2024
Made of Air
“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.” — Clarice Lispector
It’s such a simple act; to breathe. To take air into the lungs and then expel it. Typically we take around 20,000 breathes in a single day and 7.5 million in a year. Just like seconds, heartbeats, and blinks, these tiny fractions of life are finite and none us knows what that final number is. And yet we all continue to take them, to participate in this fucked up experiment nature has bestowed upon us. We collectively agree life is worth living and breathing is the act that permits us to do so.
While it doesn’t always feel this way, our bodies, and our lives as a whole, are delicate. There is no guarantee the combination of flesh, muscle, bone, and neurons will continue to work. Any moment of any day is a risk. Life is fragile and requires a constant attention to remain alive. This new series is about just that— the delicate nature of our body, mind, and life. It’s a photographic ode to fragility and the beauty that permeates it.
We are but fragments of a whole; an entity. Mere minuscule pieces of an enormous perhaps unsolvable, puzzle. Nature cares nothing about any of us and yet we continue to breathe. We opt to take part, to acknowledge our existence and make our best efforts to fit in. Every time we sleep we die and every time we wake we are born to, once again, participate in the ritual of living.
I finally consider myself fragile, something I’ve grown to realize even more in the past year. That immortal feeling many of us are bestowed with at a young age is gone. I’ve become more cautious and more understanding of the brittleness of life, however less understanding of death itself. I question it, I’m aware of it, I fear it immensely.
I’d take immortality without hesitation.