The Nature of Desire

Scott Stulberg Photography

Everything about being in love hurts me. The melancholia of not being with my heart's desire weighs me down with neurotic despondence. Even the up phase of lurve sends me reeling into a cycle of not eating, not sleeping, chain smoking and driving my friends to agitated distraction/mild amusement.
I first fell in love at twelve, and have yet to master the art of keeping my romantic teenage fantasies in check. When faced with the immenent threat of tenderness, I hold back for about two seconds before freefalling into emotion, and lose all ability to communicate as a coherent human being, enslaved both by my yen to merge with the other, and my frustration at not being able to express that. Like many humanoids, when I can not master what is within, I try to change what is with out. I have been running away from what I feel for years, travelling the globe, for work, for pleasure, mostly to create the illusion of perpetual motion, lest I stand still for too long and life, or love, catches up with me.

And now both have. Double whammy.

Suddenly I have a new found appreciation for this kind of world photography. Having grown up on a diet of Athena black and white posters my understanding of what constitutes a good "picture" maybe a bit blase. My photographic repertoire is no deeper than any reasonably exposed lay person, possibly more limited. Its been shaped by Annie Leibovitz glossy spreads in Vanity Fair, other myriad fashion photography, gritty Diane Arbus stylings, and further back, Man Ray and beyond, which is mostly pretty, so I get it, but nature and travel shots always left me a bit "eh". A friend turned me onto Peter Beard a couple of years ago, and that whimsical blend of nature, sepia and marginal writing appealed to me, as it did to thousands across the globe, but random shots of gorgeous nature, tribes, sand dunes...very "so what"? Until that is, I felt pinned down by love, and by a doomed sense of reponsibility to stay, and face the music (though why that particular phrase should apply to unpleasant tasks escapes me). Suddenly images of places far from my petty internal turmoil are soothing, reminders that this is not all that there is no matter how doggedly stubborn my longings are. Through this capsule escape I am reminded of the alternative non-love-slave human being that I am capable of being every once in a while (at which point, ironically, I suffer bouts of amnesia and miss this feeling) and my curious nature revolves around discovering this vast small world we live in, its grace and its beauty, as opposed to what the beloved is doing, thinking, eating, feeling, etc, etc.

"Cat Among the Pigeons"