What the Camera Catches When You Mean It

Photographer Grant Spanier’s most honest line about shooting Iona Catherine Small is this: I don’t photograph Iona just because I find her beautiful. We make intimate images because we are intimate. Anyone who looks at the photos can feel that. He’s right, and it’s the thing that separates photographs from records. The camera catches light indifferently. What it can’t fake is the particular attention between two people who actually know each other.

The photos he made of Iona among cherry blossoms for Sticks & Stones have that quality. She’s standing in that annual confetti of pink and white that turns every city briefly into a postcard, and the images don’t feel like a postcard. They feel like someone actually looked at her. She looks at me, I look at her, Grant says. I don’t know if viewers notice, but as the photographer, I feel it.

Cherry blossoms bloom for maybe two weeks before everything turns green and ordinary again. Photographing them is almost redundant—everyone does it, everyone’s seen it. But photographing someone you love in that window, when the light is soft and the trees are briefly ridiculous, is a different exercise. That’s a record of two specific people on a specific afternoon, and it will outlast both the blossoms and probably most other things.