Love is a many splendored thing
Meditation on photographs-3
Henri Cartier-Bresson. JAPAN. Tokyo. Hibiya district. 1965
“Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”
This image is a key to the house with 1000 windows. Each window opens into a world of thousand possibilities.
A young teenaged girl stands there, a young boy passes by, in the background an iconic poster of a 1955 Hollywood film titled “love is a many-splendored thing” where two lovers are kissing each other.
Both of them looking away in opposite direction.
The girl’s one hand gently holding the other hand from the elbow, puts her in a dramatic situation, turns her into a more intriguing subject.
Her posture hints as if a timid girl is boxed inside her own thoughts, her own feelings. She seems lost in her own world.
As if she is waiting for someone but she is already hopeless because she knows that he will never show up. There is a strange sense of melancholy in her gaze, her tender face looks sullen. There is a crowd nearby and her eyes are searching for someone with a sense of longing.
The young boy dressed in black and white is looking somewhere up in the sky. In contrast to her, his eyes are fixated at something.
I can’t derive much out his gaze,
Either he is thoughtless or there are so many things going on inside his head that he can’t judge where to look for meaning, for clarity.
So he decides to look up, towards the sky.
Maybe both of them are unaware of each other’s presence, maybe not.
Maybe it’s where the story starts
Maybe it’s where the story ends because love is a many-splendored thing.
The poster sets the premise for the story. It allows you to play inside a given frame. While you are looking at this image the poster keeps floating everywhere, it turns itself into the core idea of the image.
A moment captured out of mundane can have infinite possibilities to bring reality closer to fantasy.
Two hands about to touch each other
Two hands about to hold each other
Two hands about to leave each other
Two hands about to hurt each other.
Two eyes about to meet each other
Two eyes about to lie to each other
Two eyes about to cry together.
Two eyes about to make a thousand promises to each other in a single glance.
The glance, if captured will turn into a story of thousand different possibilities.