Story Noº 13 / 151: Hold Your Breath

Noº 13/151: Hold Your Breath
Collection: Lucid Afternoons

Most people think imagination means making things up.

I’ve come to believe the opposite.

Imagination is a way of noticing reality that realism can’t quite reach.

This photograph began with a question I couldn’t answer.

What does imagination actually look like?

Not someone imagining.
Not a dream.

Imagination itself.

If it occupied space.
If you could walk through it.

I kept returning to the same image.

A man above the clouds. A landscape where ideas behave like candy. They stretch like taffy. They drift like gumballs. A place where gravity is a suggestion and color carries more authority than physics.

2021 vs 2024 concept… My sketching has improved!

Imagination leaks into ordinary life.

It colors the world without asking permission.

One of the earliest sketches I made explored almost exactly this idea.

It wasn’t very good.

Everything was louder than it needed to be.

Looking back, I wasn’t lacking imagination.
I was lacking restraint.

A few years later, I returned to the drawing and started taking things away.

Most things don’t improve by adding.
They improve by editing.

A room.
A dish.
A photograph.
Even a life.

Perhaps that’s why realism has never interested me very much.

Reality is abundant.
Your phone already records it perfectly well.

The photographs people choose to live with usually do something else.

They alter the atmosphere of a room.
They make the familiar feel slightly unfamiliar.

They leave just enough unanswered for your imagination to have somewhere to go.

The photograph is called Hold Your Breath.

It also happens to be the first portrait I’ve made of my boyfriend Jona.

I suspect it won’t be the last.

If this was worth your time, pass it on.

This work will become a book.
Photographs and field notes by James Miille
Words by Jona Montoya