Together

"Dear Wilhelm,

Why, do you ask me... Why someone living in the early XXIst century is so tuned to your photographic art ? Why, at the time of the WWW, of Facebook and Twitter, is someone so lonely that he needs to connect with Taormina, at the end of the XIXth century and with my Arcadian and imaginary world... ?

Indeed, in our XXIst century, we have access to plenty of gay websites... Nudity, male frontal nudity are no more taboos... You just type "nude man" and Google will show you thousands of pics... So boring, so meaningless... Pornography is just here and now, there is no after, no before... no beside, no behind...

I am not interested in pornography... Too close, too poor, too obvious, too physiologic... I am looking for something else than a trigger to a "petite mort"... I am looking for what is lasting, for what creates dream and images, desires and longings...

Your photographic art makes me dream, today, in this early XXIth century, about what love and desire mean...

I am so much in love... With him, or him... Or with this another one... or just this one...

Your photographs, my dear Wilhelm, allow us to be together... We are together on the slopes of the Aetna, on the cliffs of Taormina... We are together on the edge between XIXth and XXth century...

I dream about your Taormina young men... I felt in love with a few (well mainly one) of them... I feel I know him so well... I feel him, I listen to his voice, I can almost caress him, although he is just dust in the Taormina cemetery...

Love and desire, however, are not concerned with such borders, death and life... I love him, because I feel he would have perhaps loved me... and I feel I have so much to share with him that he would perhaps have shared so much with me...

What is love, what is desire... ? What is a vintage desire, a desire for young men who are no more ?

Your photographs, dear Wilhelm, are questions... I should try to find the answers within myself...

Yours, as always...

Butterfly"