The Weight of What We See

I remember standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn, watching a woman across the tracks. She was staring at a blank concrete wall, her brow furrowed, her lips moving as if she were reciting a list of things she couldn’t afford to forget. She wasn’t looking at the wall at all; she was looking through it, into a memory or a worry that occupied the same space as the grit and the dust. We spend so much of our lives standing in front of things—monuments, construction sites, the vast, empty stretches of a coastline—but we are rarely actually seeing what is in front of us. We are seeing the internal architecture of our own histories. We bring our grief, our curiosity, and our quiet expectations to every scene, layering them over reality until the world becomes a mirror. It is a strange, lonely, and beautiful thing to realize that two people can stand in the exact same spot and inhabit entirely different universes. What are you carrying with you when you look at the world today?

Keith Goldstein has captured this exact tension in his image titled Looking On. He reminds us that the most profound stories are often found not in the grand structures we build, but in the faces of those watching them rise. Does this image make you wonder what the subject is truly seeing?