Roots and Wings

Photographer Dave Fransen shot a series for Satiety Paper’s Fall/Flight issue—a woman named Roos Vughts, a project called "Roots and Wings"—and I have been quietly, completely in love with a stranger ever since. I know nothing about her beyond what the photographs give, which turns out to be the ideal amount of information. Fransen shot her naturally, without apparent effort, with the kind of light that only works when you’re not forcing it. There’s a quality to the images where the subject seems to exist somewhere beyond the frame, the photographs catching a fragment of something ongoing rather than something arranged for the camera. That quality is what gets me. I keep finding reasons to look again.