You’re going to be seeing a lot of this look this week, and I feel a bit bad about that, but. But.

One of my favourite things about photography is the way that you can take the same subject; the same person, or place, or feeling, and just by photographing the scene differently, the resulting product is changed right down to its core. The casual disregard, the too-easy twisting and tweaking of reality is almost a transcendent action in my eyes; the ability to fully manipulate the viewer’s perception of the scene through techniques and technologies made entirely of human ingenuity without having to make headway on even the smallest of paradigm shifts.

For me, it speaks volumes about the subjectivity of the world, not just in perspective, but in the overwhelmingly transient nature of the individual experience. You can feel it in everything from a magician’s death-defying illusion; to a trick of the light; to the optical aberration, translated metaphorically into every interpersonal interaction, and it shakes us to our bones.

What we see is almost entirely controlled by what is intended for prying eyes, and what we see through a lens even moreso: what we see of each other, then, is obfuscated so efficiently by what we are wanted and want to see. When you can be sixteen or twenty-six; when warm pink bends toward a dusty cyan; when lighting and technique have more sway on the observer than the subject’s own facets, when —

When the human experience is embodied with such fantastic intensity, what then could be more sublime?