Today is the day of the eclipse.

What if every day were eclipse day? Inspired by Cocteau's Orphée, this series imagines a world of forbidden gazes, where seeing settles into absence. Orpheus and Eurydice search for each other under a relentless sun, in summers growing hotter each year.

I reread Jean Cocteau's Orphée before starting this project, his 1926 play, in which Orpheus gets his wife Eurydice back from Death on one condition: he can never look at her again. By coincidence, I finished it on the day of the eclipse, August 12th: the same day a character in the play casually announces, "Today is the day of the eclipse." "Ah!" I noted.

As if Cocteau were murmuring it into my ear, it was my own moment of "invoked or not invoked, the divine will be present."

That coincidence became the seed of this project.

I imagined a world where the star that gives us sight can just as easily take it away. Orpheus sees, but his gaze causes loss. In this world, the sun can only be looked at sideways; every day is eclipse day.

These photographs tell the story of that forbidden gaze, an act of seeing that settles into absence instead of clarity. Orpheus and Eurydice, the watchful eye and the eclipse, the sun and the moon: pairs that search for each other and lose each other in the same gesture.

This imagined world keeps pulling me back to something real, our record-beating summers, and the crushing light and heat of seasons that grow hotter every year.

The dread and wonder an eclipse stirs up feels close to facing a sun that gives no rest, one we can't stop watching even as it wears us down.

What happens to fate once an omen becomes something you live with every day?