Today we’e introducing a new series from Kyle Beachy in which he experiments with the relationship between words and photos featuring images authored by friends / collaborators. This edition features photos from Matt Price.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently staring into photographs of friendship. Which, strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as a photograph of friendship; one can’t photograph friendship any better than one can photograph an odor. But that doesn’t stop us from seeing it. Maybe friendship has its own movement language, like ballet, and being alive means being fluent in this language. We read postures and facial expressions and recognize, ah, here, this is trust, or, this is concern, or, here we see another serving of forgiveness drawn from a well that may not ever be depleted. Which, then, raises the big question: Do you, coming upon a photo that seems to capture human joy, experience joy of your own? Or do you feel something closer to longing, or even sorrow? Well probably it depends. Loneliness comes and goes, or is supposed to. So let’s start with two concrete knowns. First, what we see is a product of how we are. Second, to be in friendship is to be alive. The list for survival goes food, shelter, water, but what about the relationships that bind these letters into words, and bind these words into sense? It’s a bit of a background thing, friendship. It hides a little. Do you ever try to answer why someone is your friend? No answer is sufficient—there’s always something more that you can’t name. That’s friendship, that necessary excess.

Reading the paper the other day, I came across a phrase that stopped me cold. It seemed to thicken before my eyes and rise from the surrounding text the way clues sometimes will in detective films. The words turned red and began to pulse: “a new kind of loneliness.” Here, I thought, is a string of words that deserves to be made into balloons or at least carved into the middle of a table. Who…I mean did we do this? Americans? It sure feels like some us shit. Meanwhile, loneliness itself is too old to comprehend—the evolutionary explanation points 52 million years into the past with the earth’s first primates, who were doomed the second they lost their groups. Now, when we’re alone or just with people who don’t understand, our bodies will sometimes produce the anxiety that we call loneliness. It’s our shared vulnerability, a fleshy exposure we all carry around hiding beneath our clothing. People may have been lonely since before they were people, but it took some time before they realized how effective loneliness can be. Fascism relies on the lonely. Hannah Arendt believed that friendship subverts power. She believed that the outcome of friendship, what friendship produces, is freedom.

Sometime in the early oughts, off on and for a period of several months, maybe a year, I had my only experience with a recurring dream. Please believe me when I say that it was the most mundane situation anyone could imagine. Nothing of note happened in these dreams. There was no fantasy, no flying or even falling. It was only me and Boston’s own PJ Ladd hanging out somewhere uninteresting. At least a few of the dreams took place in an extremely typical, carpeted and furnished midwestern basement. Maybe there were snacks but nothing exotic. I can remember PJ always wearing a blue éS hoodie. And nothing happened. Except, I mean, that we were friends. This part was built into the mechanism—the mundanity wasn’t a failure of my dreaming. This was obviously a case of boringness as testament to the organic, sincere nature of our friendship. And because I woke from these dreams more than once, I came to know well the disappointment of these mornings. It’s not that I didn’t have actual friends, or that these friends weren’t enough for me, but simply a matter of that dreamed familiarity, that soothing boredom of complete comfort, giving sudden way to the icy complications of waking life.

Speaking of freedom, my friend Adam once received what has to be among the most comically insulting book reviews ever to appear in the New York Times. I should say that before he became a friend Adam was someone I knew of, a friend of a friend, who I sometimes viewed as a kind enemy. Meaning, his success was a thing that I took personally. Not always, but sometimes. Saying this now it’s just so ridiculous, this dumb envy and its unnecessary loneliness. Anyway, the review is terrible, petty and mean and deeply, miserably self-centered. Recently I asked Adam what he thinks of it all by now, years later. “That guy,” he said, shrugging, “he just doesn’t like my face.” Which I suppose is how these things will often go. Isn’t this what we get for walking around with these faces attached to our heads? It reminds me of a question I nearly had the chance to ask a few years back: Does a recluse think of themself as a recluse? By which I mean, are you someone who believes in mystery and silence and solitude or is that just a story we tell about you? That the recluse in question bailed on the interview only deepened my sense that he was the right guy to ask. Plus, the answer was right there–he didn’t care what story I told. Probably, that kind of caring is a thing he reserves for friends. Probably, that’s part of what Hannah Arendt meant by freedom.

Late one morning, in the final stretch of a long walk through a damp and gray neighborhood, my dog and I passed a row of the two-flats common to Chicago, enfenced in black iron, with a few stairs climbing from the gate up to the front door. Standing on one of the stoops was a boy, maybe three or four years old, wearing a raincoat and sweats, swinging his sleeves and watching us closely. When it came, his voice was tiny beneath the citysounds, and even smaller for his obvious caution. “Hi,” he said, and I slowed but didn’t stop because this is the big American city and I’m a stranger and didn’t want to scare anyone. But his hand was at his cheek and he was looking at me, and so, “Hello”, I said. And then, with the deliberation of a tourist reading from a second-hand phrase book, the boy asked, “How are you?” Now I stopped. The air was warmer than it had been in months and the dog’s tail was whipping. I told the kid I was good, and he told me that he was good too, and then I wished him well and kept walking. There is nothing in this world more fragile than a stranger. I mean touch one even glancingly, look or listen with the slightest concentration and they will shatter into something totally else.

What Blessing is This #1: Matt Price