subject echo: that pensive gaze

when i saw the top image (taken by Jocelyn Lee) of Dr. Rachael Phelps in a New York Times Magazine article on "The New Abortion Providers" it brought to mind Hellen van Meene's photograph of another gazing lady.

the photo pair gives me the uncanny thought of van Meene's teenage subject—with her blond curls, set mouth, baroque hand gestures, and her expressive and introspective gaze—growing out of her awkward adolescence (van Meene's specialty) and into the visual role of the calm and caring doctor.

in the Times article, Dr. Phelps speaks about how chronic pain she experienced as an adolescent girl is what led her to her path as a doctor at Planned Parenthood.

i think you can see the deep feeling we associate with adolescence transform into empathy—on the part of both the subject and the viewer—in the images above.

fallen from trees

Detail of My Sort of Light
by Ander Monson

Now I know that everything is a body,
so even the snow and the sand and
the blood rivered down in the snow,
and snowed on again so it's buried
is a body. All things are bodies in photos—
detail of the left side of a breast and the arm's
pit—detail of the sled slumbered under
by the storm's leavings. Detail of my sort
of so-early half-lit eyelid light that bodies
are near to invisible and touch is no longer
the sole way of knowing, and outline is all
that there is. Detail of your body as it does
its morning leaving thing. Detail of what
light there is on your skin. Detail of land-
scape of let me in please and coffee, warm
when the weather's action on this body is less
than ideal. Landscape with pear. Landscape
with weather and part of a breast in the frame.



photograph from Susan Worsham's project Fallen From Trees. (click on the image to see it large enough to make out the pears. :-)

joan jonas