A book of portraits is a book of violent revelations. A book of portraits is the utmost instrument of empathy. It is challenging to square the archetypal framing of photography as violation with the soft, round, certain determination to accept that guides Maria Fleischman’s practice. Her subject selection is key to the success of I cannot touch the horizon. She photographs a beloved friend with awareness that her possession of the camera transforms her into a conduit for knowledge that is incessantly inaccessible to her subject. Who among us does not yearn to know how our bodies are perceived when we are busy perceiving other people’s bodies? Who among us is not terrified to know what we look like when we think that we are all alone? Susan Sontag wrote that while the painter constructs, “the photographer discloses.” Perhaps one’s method of disclosure is the central quality that defines them as a photographer.

Fleischman achieves existential equanimity in her practice by being intuitively attuned to the desires of her subjects in their processes of self-representation while refusing to sacrifice the primitive kernels of truth present in the gesture, the arch of the spine. Her subjects are not subjects at all but complicit agents in scenes where integrity and compassion can coexist. Fleischman’s integrity as an artist further manifests itself in the form structuring her content, for the semi-transparent pages of I cannot touch the horizon serve to disrupt the singularity of temporal experiences implied by photography. Time disrupts the possibility of stable identity construction; feverish mutability defines the self. The role of subject, agent, performer, artist, friend that one is perceived as inhabiting in any single moment can only be understood when held up against every other translucent moment, moments that become unintelligible once overlapping.

There are two problems. The first is time, and the second is figuring out how we should care for one another. Rather than try to solve either, Fleischman tenderly represents an exercise in time and in care that expands past the margins of the pages. What is intimacy if not attention compounded by intuition?

Maeve Aickin