This pairing of flea-market photographs has hung above my desk for as long as I can remember. It’s something that just happens: the pictures in my collection gravitate to each other, uniting over time and continents with their image soul mates in balancing, contradicting layers.
The delicate airiness of the canoodling lovers echoes back the earthbound, abandoned grace of the bucks. The heat of her breath, her hand caught in motion, counters the frozen stillness of arched neck and nuzzle of snout on velvet ear. The images resist each other on first meeting but have alchemical communion: in both, whispered secrets are shared.
Weschler Responds.
Nice catch, Kim. This one is exceptionally lovely. Although more and more haunting the deeper you look into it. Are we dealing with a Buckback Mountain situation here? Or are the two bucks not so much nuzzling as, well, precisely, bucking, endeavoring to establish supremacy and dominance? A question that then ripples back into the earlier photo. Yes, as you suggest with your title, love and war, the one endlessly blurring into the other.