A khaki-green bag, open, its zipper at the center of the frame.
One might see a gaping jaw, crossed by an image.
Personally, I see a wound — parted, creased, constricted.
But each of us projects what we will:
our tireless attempts at creation, our archives, our dead.
And then, there is this image within the image:
a double mouth, mid-scream.
A cry held in.
A cry no one hears.
A casket bearing what we would rather ignore.
Photography invents nothing.
It merely unfastens the zipper — just enough to let pain escape.
An echo of silenced cries, fractured bodies, stifled voices.
Women, children, men, animals — all of life ground down by the monstrosity of war, the mechanics of power, the hunger for conquest — territorial or symbolic.
The bag, colored by war, becomes a metaphor for a world that carries its wounds.
The image is in the bag — or in the black box.
But it spills over.
It spills from our silences.
From our passive complicity.
From our pitiful pursuits of domination.
Metaphorically, photography, like us, carries its own bags.
It drags them.
Conceals them.
Sometimes it lays them bare.
It opens them like one opens a wound.
Or seals them tight, under pressure.
These bags are our stories.
Our burdens.
Our obsessions.
Our wounds.
Our ghosts.
Everything we have lived, witnessed, dreamt, or feared.
And from bearing all of it, photography becomes like us:
exhausted.
Saturated with meaning, with suffering, with images already oversaturated.
Horror.
Fear.
Solitude.
The world’s chaos.
All of it heaped inside.
Within, it overflows.
Without, it erupts.
There is this sense that nothing more can be held.
That every new bag is one too many.
That photography — and we, along with it — stand on the edge of rupture.
Breathless.
We have become the mules of our own pain.
Of our own narratives.
And photography is our accomplice.
Our mirror.
Our messenger.
So perhaps it is time to say: enough.
Perhaps it is time to face the excess.
To acknowledge it.
To make peace with it.
Not to purge it,
but to transform it.
Into a voice.
A shape.
A protest.
A poetry of excess.
