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^Goya's Portrait of Jovellanos is the one chosen by Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht . We took 139 pictures right before the ending of 2007, of which I have selected some for this post. These are, so to speak, some sketches, but not the final ones. I need to work on the tones and more particularly, on the blacks. Something Sepp Gumbrecht does not know is that right after this session, my camera stopped working. Is this fate?

The pictures were taken in his office, at Pigott Hall, Stanford University. It's located on one of the corners of the building. Gumbrecht's library sports a perfect order. For some reason, I payed special attention to his volumes of Plato and to his volumes of Céline's romances. This, and two signs: one of them establishing the point where history ends, the other one being the landmark where philosophy begins.

The techinicalities do not matter very much. For some reason, this time I did not think that they were really important. Not that I did not set the lights (two photofloods plus an indirect flash on top of the camera body), or that I forgot to examine the exposure. But, for the first time in this project, I did not set a background and, above all, I did not direct the model. I only asked him "look at me" once, and that was all. 

As for the rest, the season was also pretty unique. Normally, the photographer asks the model to talk as little as possible, to avoid weird gestures, eye-rolling, etc. This, instead, was a long conversation. The photographer was trying to find the decisif instant between utterances; not just the silences, but rather the moments in which a thought was about to be created. Like the three silences at the beginning of Wagner's Tristan, each of them preceding a chromatic ascension.