With his new series, James Friedman makes a digression that is both fanciful but also more serious than it appears. He shows smiling kisses, kisses full of tears, mischievous tears, kisses from the moon or the sun, gingerbread kisses, kisses to watch, labyrinthine kisses, kisses that aren’t flat or sometimes on a wrong note, pepper and salt kisses, countryside kisses, intimately smouldering kisses (those that can burst into flame), kisses that are solvable or puzzling, kisses straight out of the movies, kisses that prefer the shadow to the light, kisses that don’t leave you at a loss for words, cake kisses and those so light they make you climb up the curtains.
But there are also bald kisses and those in plaits, kisses in the fog and often a prowling voyeur in the area. But such kisses don’t stop even if we ignore everything about them. Each spectator makes what use of it as he or she pleases. Because it doesn’t have to deny or affirm anything, neither meaningless happiness nor an abuse of confidence, the photograph remains the only response we can give to the union in which the kiss is involved. So we don’t have to look for something hidden in the work, but just get caught up interminably in its natural tendency to give life to a temporal space fleetingly aroused by its flame, its madness, its suspense, its dizziness. What arises is the close adherence to what is desire, about which we know nothing and which has no name. The kisses go down paths, foreign to what is going on around them and to the voyeurs next to them.
INFORMATION
James Friedman, « Pleasure and terrors of kissing » (2016).
http://www.jamesfriedmanphotographer.com
