Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

— continued at run.ltw » Naming

In Montreal, for the first time, I began to actively seek out and take pictures of people. Before this, my primary interest had been urban photography. Deserted buildings, bright dumpsters, bricked-in alleyways — these were the things that fascinated me, because of the opportunity they gave me to disorient notions of beauty and urban geography. And being a photographer in spaces like those also troubles notions of a clean divide between the public and the private.

But then in Montreal, people sought me out and asked me to take their pictures. It went to my head. Montreal is a city full of people constantly on display. Its people take a good picture. So I was surrounded by beautiful people who wanted beautiful pictures, and I was happy to oblige. I became a little giddy.

But I’ve been thinking a lot these days about human bodies and a camera’s relation to them. I’ve been trying to write about it too, and have been getting stuck. I want to draw a parallel between a proprietorial relationship to language and the potentially limiting effect of a camera (at least in terms of the photographer’s relationship to the models/bodies). There is something so surgical about the process that I have vague, inarticulate concerns …