“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”
~Aaron Siskind, from Quote Quest
This week’s Kink of the Week and Quote Quest come at a time when I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about photography, both erotic and not. On the erotic side, I’ve been looking through my Fetlife prof-ile after I have had discussions with prospective play partners in which several of my pictures came up. I haven’t looked back on the photos from those six years I spent with W since, well, since he’s been gone. There are several more current ones from my relationship with my previous kink partner, but nothing like the volume that W took. For him, erotic photography really was a fetish. I talked in the past specifically about W’s fascination with photography, and my own conflicted feelings about same, here in “The Story of Pictures”, and peppered my blog with my thoughts and feelings about it. His photography shaped our play and our relationship in so many ways.
Today though, I am looking at the topic not from within its immediacy – what it’s like to see myself that way in the aftermath of the scene – but almost like a kaleidoscope, picture on picture scrolling back through the past, through my life, through my life with him. He really believed that if you didn’t capture it on film, it would be lost to memory, and it seems this has born out – until I saw the pictures again, I had forgotten so much of what we had done! It’s still bittersweet to look through them, but more sweet than bitter after all this time.
There’s something else that I am struck by in a particularly sweet-but–also-almost-painful-way: seeing myself reflected in these images I remember not only what we did, but who I was – who we were. I see what he made of me, and who I became in that relationship, the depth and the breadth of our kink connection, but also of our love, and who I was in his eyes. That woman that he loved so well is beautiful and fierce, and, in the end, unconquerable.
I miss that woman.
If we remember everything in such detail, looking at the photo, it means that it has not been forgotten, it has simply been postponed deeper in our memory. Everything that is stored in it and constitutes our human self.
What has become of this invincible woman now?
Apparently she is not so invincible! Have been working my way back from a hard breakup and haven’t had the energy to write here. But I’ve got some fun things to write about too, so maybe…? We’ll see. I’m a tough cookie to break!
Thank you for your reply and wish you a speedy return!