(a few) portraits

What’s a portrait? And what is it for? Halting time? Capturing the essence of a person? Reinventing him/her, flooding him/her with a new light, unexpected and disturbing, less mundane and conventional? Perhaps this is all rhetoric. Or an illusion. I don’t know. A portrait, for me, is first and foremost a necessity: the urge to tell, and to return, through my gaze, a face, two eyes, a gesture, and the world within them. A portrait is an act of trust. It is mutual trust. It’s meeting in the middle. And that’s why it always astonishes me. And it can really give a new light. That doesn’t halt time, not that. But it can tell it to wait. Just a little bit longer.​​​​​​​