Stephen K. Schuster: Kelly

Copyright © Stephen K. Schuster

Last week, photographer Steven K. Schuster, a curator for Humble Arts Foundation and director of photography at Mass Appeal magazine, e-mailed me and let me know about his new self-published book and asked if he could send me a copy. Like Amy Stein, I love getting gifts in the mail, so I wasn’t about to turn him down. Plus, I liked his simple description of the book: “a limited-edition photography book on a past relationship. It’s called Kelly. . . .” Given my past few days of thinking about a photo project on my relationship with S., it seemed serendipitous.

I don’t think it’s easy, photographing a relationship. I could see some photographers using the camera as a barrier between themselves and their partners. There’s that whole idea that if you’re photographing something, you’re not really experiencing it—you’re thinking about the camera instead of engaging in what’s happening around you, or you’re objectifying the person on the other side of the lens (like, some would say, Harry Callahan did with his wife, Eleanor—as Jon Feinstein alludes to in his introduction to Stephen’s book). And yet, to really photograph a relationship that you’re part of, I think you have to be all in—you can’t hold back any part of yourself. It seems like it could be a delicate balancing act. And if it is, Stephen has managed it without a misstep.

These images give me a real sense of who Stephen is (or who he was with Kelly), as well as a sense of who they were together. I keep looking through this book trying to figure out how or why I feel this way . . . and I don’t know if I have an answer yet. I just know that this little book is one I’ll return to again and again, and that’s no small thing.

For what it’s worth, I think that I experience things more deeply when I’m photographing—there’s a level of focus that I don’t have otherwise. And that makes me want to photograph my relationship with S. even more.

Thanks, Stephen, for sending this my way.