In general, I don’t intend to post all too many pictures here as much anymore. But having just uploaded a handful of photos from over the weekend, I was looking through my Flickr photostream and this one gave me a little bit of pause.

She took this at my apartment a few days after we had the conversations that ended everything so abruptly. I look dirty, tired, unclean and unshaven, and I’m out of focus. If you ever start to take photographs, or even simply think seriously about photographs and art in general, you realize that every photograph is a reflection of the person making it. It’s not just a captured moment, but a window into a certain subject-object relationship. It’s a hard-to-explain quality about photographs, but it has to do with the point of view of the eye composing the photo being actually part of the content inside/outside of the frame.

When she says, “I just don’t want a relationship right now,” I will always hear it as “I just don’t want a relationship with you right now.” And this photo doesn’t make it any easier not to hear that.

This image is a still from a new Grist video commemorating the CEO’s receipt of a Heinz Award. For obvious reasons, I am not going to provide the link to it myself. If you want to see it, you will have find it on your own, which admittedly is not extremely difficult.

This marks my second cameo in a Grist video. The first appears here.

Photo made by V. Martin.

Photo by Nick Hegge.

Photo made by Sarah Smith.

Me and friend Katie at Senior Prom, June 7, 2005. I’m excited to see this one when I go home this coming July.

There’s just nothing in the world quite like new strings.

Downtown Portland edition. Photo made by V.