Once, he did a series of photographs named skin. He invited various people, family, friends, acquaintances, enemies, and had them sit, one by one, naked, on his little chair in the gray-coloured room. The walls had once been white, but now they were peeling, speckled with absence of paint, bruised grey by time’s lips.

He set up a tripod behind the chair, and zoomed in, trailing the camera over the shoulders, smooth, or awkward, brown or white dusted with rose, freckled porcelain or slovakian cityscapes… It was like he was caressing them, touching them, these women and men who hesitated, then entreated.

Everyone wanted to believe they were beautiful, and something in him held the promise that on film, they could be.

It was a sudden and intimate communication, the murmuring of commands through stale air, the gentle, pleading touch of his eyes, his hands brushing - flesh against metal, over the camera, his mouth set and firm and his eyes dark.

And they would sit there, both flushed and pleased and uncomfortable all at the same time, trapped in this gilded cage of pure tension, watching uneasily as he pleased himself with their image, and, waiting for that time, when things were just right. When the pose was exactly what he wanted, when the smile only caught a little at the illusion of purely fathomed emotion, with connotations of happiness, of pleasure, then he woud silence the whole earth around them.

Hoarse, rasping words. « Stop. There. That’s perfect. It’s perfect. »

And they were perfect. And there we be nothing, tehre would be nothing but grey, and still air, and soft breath. Inhale, exhale, catch.

And a whirring, mechanical click would occur, and the world would explode into motion again. But slow motion, like a fast forward of a flower blooming, a tree growing, a child migrating through and ocean of colour from tears to laughter.

And they would be perfect in that second after the noise and before the blooming.

And he would have made, sweetly sad love to them in that time.