The Wind Will Carry Us

Sometimes I despair at the thought that photography cannot really make life any better for me or the people I photograph, especially when life isn’t at its easiest. I keep coming back to the way photography can hold on to something of a passing moment — a place, an encounter, a feeling. But more often than not, I can’t cope with looking at photographs of people or places I have lost. They can be too much for the heart. A few days ago, the calendar brought me back to the most painful loss of my life. I shared a photograph or two on Instagram, but I couldn’t bear to look at them. Instead, I listened to Bach’s St Matthew Passion all evening, shed a few tears, and eventually fell into something like sleep.

While posting the other image we shot here, I stumbled upon Sophie Hunger’s adaptation of Le Vent Nous Portera. I knew only a few words of French, but somehow knew right away this was the song I was looking for. That line — the wind will carry us — has lived with me for a long time, as the same words appear in the work of an Iranian poet, whose poetry I was almost madly infatuated with in my twenties. As a woman openly expressing her emotions and desires decades ago in Iran, she lived a very short and difficult life, and so much of it found its way, courageously and beautifully, into her poems. Perhaps because of that, I had always heard those words with dark connotations.

But what struck me about the original Noir Désir song was that the wind is not simply a metaphor for loss or disappearance. To me, there is something strangely affirmative in it too — not only something that takes things away, but something that carries us with it.

A photograph cannot heal the wounds of your soul. It cannot bring back what is gone, or promise that anything will last. But if an image you make can give you, the person you make it with, or someone who sees it, for a split second, the feeling that something has suddenly come alive inside you — that you could spread your wings and fly with the wind, above it all — then maybe photography is worth it after all. And to me, this image, thanks to Odile, has something of that. 

With Odile in London Fields.
From the series Here We Are.