JONAS

An ongoing photographic portrait of my partner Jonas, photographed over ten years. Through fragments of his body, shared spaces and everyday life, the work explores intimacy, time, memory, and the changing ways we see someone we love.

I want to make a book of Jonas. This was never my intention when we met in New York, just nineteen and twenty-one years old. At the time, I was simply enamoured by this German boy with his shortly lived shaved head. The earliest photographs were made on a disposable camera, until Jonas introduced me to a point-and-shoot. He introduced me to a lot of things: music, art, culture, knowledge. He was a vessel and I was a sponge.

Years later, while finally sorting through a decade of negatives, I found myself looking at these photographs with thirty-year-old eyes. What I saw was not only Jonas, but time itself. I could suddenly see how young we were. Two people moving through their formative years together, growing into our adult minds and bodies while, somehow, still holding hands.

There is a particular intimacy in knowing another person for this long. I know the geography of his body almost instinctively: where his moles are, the shape of his hands, the way his hair catches the sun and becomes lighter at the crown during the summer, the language of his face. I photograph these things because I am fascinated by them, fascinated by this man in my life. But also because I know they are temporary. Because we are ever-evolving.

There is an element of obsession in this kind of looking. To know someone closely is to become acquainted with their smallest variations; to notice what has appeared, what has disappeared, what is no longer quite the same. Photography offers a way of holding onto these fragments, even while knowing that the act of holding is futile. The photograph preserves a moment precisely because the moment cannot be preserved.

At first, I wanted to exclude myself and our relationship outside of the book. I did not want it to become a love letter. But over ten years, a relationship contains so many different kinds of feeling. There are periods of being completely enamoured, periods of distance, difficult years, moments of reconnection, and times when I photographed him less because of emotional or physical distance. I realised the photographs do not only capture Jonas, but also the relationship between and by the changing person I have become as a photographer.

I am interested in adolescence as a transitional state - a period suspended between who we are and who we imagine we might become. Only from the other side of it can we recognise the freedom contained within that uncertainty. Looking back, I see an innocence in the early photographs, not only in Jonas but in my own way of photographing him. Me and my camera, too, were growing up.

Throughout the editing, I keep returning to the idea of transience. Jonas is often in transit: different beds, different rooms, different countries. These photographs were made over a decade in which both of us lived and worked within industries built around movement and impermanence. Places, rooms and bodies changed.

And yet, within all this movement, there was something that always remained. Jonas.