Here sits a man.
Beneath him a marble bench shows its age, which is likely far older than the man. Far older than his grandfather, perhaps. It has seen many pictures, many poses. It has seen cameras shrink from the size of a backpack to the size of a credit card. It has seen many men and women seated here. It has lasted long enough that this man and the woman he cradles have gone from being an affront to society, to simply another couple, even here where Popes once roamed.
The man, and the beautiful woman are locked in an embrace. She leans towards him, her head touching his hooded shoulder. Her black hair, a sharp contrast to her porcelain skin, shines over the black fabric like a sheet of glass.
It cannot be said that he is in love, not definitively. His eyes, those upturned brown orbs, a sharp contrast to his downturned face a broad nose, say he cares very deeply for the woman resting beside him. Whether that caring is love or lust can only be gauged by time and further examination.
Here again sits the man. He is alone now. A smile sweeps up his face from left to right. Those eyes, before inscrutable, have a definite glaze of dissatisfaction. They do not seem staged, as the pose seems staged. Here he is straightened. His shoulders tilt backwards. His gut is sucked in to the point where it disappears beneath the ripples of his deep blue shirt.
He has learned, perhaps from the earlier image, that when he tilts his head down he looks quite demonic. It isn’t the smile or the eyes alone, but a particular combination of these factors across the smooth brown expanse of skin that completes the effect. Now he tilts his chin upwards. It gives him the look of a man who just backed a very large truck into a much smaller spot.
It is impossible to say if who this man is without the woman is who he is when beside her. We are all, it seems, staged in one fashion or another to appear in a certain way. This happens in stages, from the first clicks arriving from the cradle to the final close of the shutter moments from the grave. It can be said, at least, that he is incomplete from one image to the next, as the flashes of our lives wind us from night to day to night again.