Story Noº 15 / 151: When It’s Raining

Noº 15/151: When It’s Raining
Collection: Sundays in the Solarium

What do you see?

I’ve become increasingly suspicious of that question.

Recently, I exhibited twenty of my photographs at La Joya Azul in San Miguel de Allende. For several hours, about a hundred gay men wandered through the hotel surrounded almost entirely by other men—on the walls, in the rooms, on the terrace, and occasionally standing beside me.

I spent much of the evening acting as a voyeur of voyeurs.

Someone would fall for a face. Someone else for a body. Someone wanted the Statement Size of one. Someone bought four Standard Sizes.

Taste is wonderfully unreasonable.

You looked. And you wanted to keep looking.

I think this is one reason I photograph men.

Beauty is an appetite. Art depends on it. So does sex. So does dinner.

You can be served something technically immaculate and feel absolutely nothing. Then someone puts a peach in front of you at precisely the right moment in August, and suddenly you’re Elio in that infamous scene in Call Me by Your Name.

When It’s Raining has been particularly good at exposing this problem.

I know what I see because I made it.

When I was a child, I remember sitting with my family in the back of a car at the little airport in Livermore where my dad kept his plane. Outside, it was pouring.

I loved being there. I still do…

Not in the rain. Just outside it.

There were ladybugs drowning in the puddles. I would rescue them, bring them back inside, and wait for their wings to dry.

Then they would fly directly back into the rain.

As one does…

There are a few ladybugs at Mario’s feet in the photograph. One is climbing his leg. You would probably never know they were there unless I told you.

That is what I see.

Mario sees something else.

When we spoke about the photograph, he told me he saw a tribute to his younger self. He had spent years building ways of protecting himself. Coping mechanisms. Defenses. Things that had once been necessary.

Now, in his forties, he was learning how to live outside some of them.

Truth is…

Once a photograph leaves my studio, I lose jurisdiction over it.

I can talk your ear off about it. But I cannot tell you what to desire.

Nor would I want to.

A collector takes something that began inside my head and places it inside his life. After that, the photograph accumulates meanings I will never know.

Perhaps that is taste at its most interesting.

Not knowing what we are supposed to want.

Knowing what we want anyway.

So look again.

Where did your eye land?

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