Every shoot begins with lighting tests. Tentative shutter clicks as you shift how shadow drapes on the nose, the right ear, a corner. More shutter clicks. (Is the battery charged?) Absent-minded compositions to guide where light sits – a clavicle, the wrinkle of a smile – fitted with modifiers, a honeycomb, to be made softer. These moments mark the beginning, like an orchestra targets 440 Hertz, tuning to color silence with measured breaths. I exhale for the photographic encounter. My finger finds a button: in a 60th of a second a shutter clicked, aimed for the decisive moment the lights flood
Shoot!
The maker of a photograph is a trigger
Shoot!
This = black-bodied trigger with beauty at the end of its Ready-Aim-
Shoot!
At fractions of a second, beauty is made as it is taken – 16ths, 32nds, 64ths – spaces so small only breaths pass, in and out, a nostril, in and out, a barrel, a lens
Shoot!
SOMETHING GIVEN, SOMETHING SHARED
Portraits of Kevin Mwachiro
