Sep 14, 2016 @ 20:30 CET

Dear Ivan,

Incipient age indeed… maybe we should measure our age, not in years and the expectancies that come along with them, but in the frequency of irreversible things happening to our bodies and minds, the little resignations we make along the way, subconsciously stacking one on top of another until suddenly we realise and wonder.

This year was one of them. Three different mechanical defects. On three separate occasions a physician told me there wasn’t much else to do but to accept. A too early decay. Nothing life altering or life threatening or anything like that, but large enough to have to make adjustments. And so it goes.

It would be fascinating to x-ray an entire mountain. I picture a mountain like a head, the quarry like a mouth, the marble like a chipped tooth. Surveyors have had a difficult time estimating the remaining marble left inside the Carrara mountain because of all the rubble, but consensus is that at the current rate of approximately a million tonnes cut away every year, there still is marble left for several centuries to come.

And of course your fig leaf makes me wonder what’s behind it. Fig leafs seemingly block our views and paths, but this is actually only true when we feel the urgency to know what lies ahead. But having a perfect view of our future path won’t make us calm down. It’ll only make us want to change that path, because we’ll never be content with it anyway.

Maybe it’s the general attitude of walking towards something instead of walking away from something that resonates with me. Again, the difficult balance between history, present and future. Memory, feeling and hope working together intricately. Who we are and who we want to be, and how desperately we cling on to the image we have of ourselves and the path we want for ourselves.

The changing of a season. Accepting myself, not so perfect as I imagined, having turned my lensless eye on myself. Walking.

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