Everything Is in the Gaze – one Year Without My Bodyguard

In the first months after my husband passed away, I could not manage to do much. Friends invited me to dinners, to conversations and warmth. I felt surrounded by love, yet after an hour I wanted to go home. Back to the solitude. Back to my bodyguard.

Every day I looked at photographs of him. Perhaps it is simply that strength disappears. Or perhaps it is something else. A need to be swallowed by memory, to grieve without interruption. Everything continues. The grief is just as heavy, but the days have grown lighter.

I once spoke with Håkan Ludwigson, a remarkable photographer, and I tried to explain a feeling I carried, how painful it was to look at photographs of my husband taken by others. Images that were beautiful, technically flawless, lovingly made. It took time before I understood why.

He said: write about it. So I am trying.

The photographs I could bear to see were the ones I had taken myself. In those, he is not looking into the camera, but at me. His gaze rests in my eyes. That is where the love lives. The gaze reveals the relationship. How had I not seen it before?

The wedding photograph; He looks at me. I look out toward you. Love moves through the image, out into the room, toward the one who stands and watches.

It is a gentle way to think of love, that it keeps flowing onward.

And then to art.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, photo by Nicolas Guérin

Many years ago, when my bodyguard and I were driving back to Sweden, I mentioned that I needed to stop and visit a photographer who was then living outside Paris. His name was Nicolas Guérin. We had arranged to meet and talk, to stay the night and continue our journey the next day back to Sweden. My bodyguard grumbled when he heard my plan. He thought it tiresome that I was always working. But he found it far more interesting when I told him Nicolas was a brilliant nude photographer.

That evening became one of our most memorable.

Nicolas met us at the driveway and told us he was in deep sorrow, the love of his life had left him. The meeting was immediate, direct, without ornament, as if we had known each other forever. We spoke about the many encounters he had had with some of the world’s finest directors and actors. Nicolas was a grand-scale film devotee. He created the portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the one, in my view, that is among the very best. The one where his eyes are closed.

There is a calmness in that image. Closed eyes shut us out, and yet they draw us near, without making us feel pulled inside.

Someone once said about closed eyes: a quiet yes to presence, and a gentle no to the world.

Dan Wolger To be looked at, crosseyed, from a distance

I think of Dan Wolgers’ large self-portrait that hangs at Hotel Tylösand in Halmstad, Sweden. Two large photographs placed side by side. In both he crosses his eyes. The idea is that at a certain distance, with a slight shift in the image, and if the viewer also crosses their eyes, the two works merge into one figure. A faint dizziness comes easily, but when it happens, it is magic. There is a scientific explanation for it, something an ophthalmologist once told me after an art viewing I held at the hotel many years ago.

The idea is delightfully mad.

Everything is found in the eyes, my friends 

Look there.