June 22, 2016 @ 02:55 GMT

Dear Anton,

At night lying in the dark, I can feel my heart bumping in my ribcage and equally, the slow diminishment of myself. With time comes the desire to build memorials, even to the single life that I have. I think about how to depict or show this feeling, but every expression of it seems to emerge as sentiment, pretense, or nostalgia.

You share something simple with me, a thought about your stepson, an urge for sunshine. I marvel at this unfussy, stubborn idea you’ve presented. What’s true for you at the moment, or plainly in front of you. Doglike, in your language. Yet you hint at something unsettled. The red crosshairs in your image, and the human form next to them. I suddenly understand that we’re looking down the barrel of a gun.

As images come I both want to share them with you and to hold on to them, in the fantasy that they might become something else, more durable or original. Something memorialized, or at least memorable. I try to let go of that impulse, for who knows if I will make something larger than myself, or if it is helpful to ask that question. Though I have also found that letting images sit, forgetting them for years, may alter their meaning in unexpected ways. This is the response, I think, to your question about whether I can act without being concerned with what the act reveals.

I should mention I’m now in London. It’s late, I’ve woken suddenly. I’m in a hotel above Charing Cross. I can feel the thrumming of traffic, the continuous flow of night busses, the Tube deep underground. Nelson stands on his column, just out of sight in Trafalgar Square. On the fourth plinth, for public art, the skeleton of a horse in bronze, its sharp, serrated ribs.

#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram

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