Dreaming about an horizon

(Personal collection)

"In my work, there are several photographs where a boy is linked to an horizon. Perhaps because any boy is an horizon, and any horizon invites the viewer to go elsewhere... And also because there is no desire without an elsewhere, without an horizon... On a mere technical level, it is not an easy task to make a boy coinciding with a geographical horizon. First, the photographer should find the right place, where the viewer's gaze will be free to wander between a foreground and a background. Then, he shoud find the better light, this kind of light that, I know it for sure, will melt the sky and the sea into the same kind of white mist. I should just find the best place to set up my camera, in order to shift from what is close to the most remote horizon, from the rocks of the foreground to the cartographical outline in the background. Actually, I love the way the Sicilian coast is flying off and disappears at the top of my photograph... 

Of course, my model is at the foreground. I will not tell you his name again, since you know it already... But he is one of my beloved ones, among all the boys of Taormina. I love his teen boy's grace, I love his brune hair, his Mediterranean face, so Greek, so Sicilian. I love the loincloth nonchalantly put around his hips, a care for decency that sometimes he forgot... Among all my models, I would say he is the closest to the Arcadian shepherds I can imagine while reading Theocritus or Vergil's poems.

My photograph caught him while he is just awakening, at the hottest peak of the day, when anyone just needs to sleep and relax. He is alone, lost in the borders of the country, in the eschatiai, so far from Taormina, so far from any cultivated fields, he is just in the wild pastures, where goats and sheeps are used to graze, but where gods can be met too.

My cute shepherd, leaning against a rock... Who are you looking at ? Is it Pan, or Dionysos and his satyrs, of Hermes, the messenger of Olympian gods ? Or perhaps you are looking at a nymph, lost between a spring and a forest ? Or... well..  perhaps you are just looking at the eye of my camera, or at you, you who are seduced by this photograph ?"

Von Gloeden Archive, Von Gloeden's diary (publication in progress).