Page 1 of Gaze

prologue

It was the cusp of the new millennium. I didn’t know it yet, but everything was about to change. The world stood on a knife edge ready to fall, and little did I know it but I along with it was going to change, forever. In the summer of 1998, in the sweltering heat, I found things out about myself that not even the most depraved minds, in the darkest nights, dared ask themselves.

That summer I lost myself, looking out my window watching the people around me. I had never paid them any mind before, but they became like ants in a colony, and I was a child with a magnifying glass. I obsessed over their every move, every detail in their lives became a fixation to me.

I lived in Greenwich Village, a selection of nothing streets and nothing buildings in the heart of New York City. Out of the dingy windows you could see a few of the other small apartment buildings whose fronts faced on to the next crosstown street. A mix of brick, wood, steel, and concrete make up a maze of interlinked structures, each one fighting for dominance in the urban jungle. I do not live in a wealthy neighborhood, but neither is it particularly poor. What it is, is practical, for people living on marginal incomes either by choice or design, a collection of people with nothing in common but the walls that separate them. I live here because it's anonymous, because people don't question who I am or what I do, they don't talk to me when they pass me in the street or in the corridor. We carry on our own existence quietly apart from each other. I like it this way. A warren of brick buildings, some four stories’ high; others five; with mixes of peaked roofs, others flat, most supporting iron railings and stairs snaking up their spines. It was like living in a grey monolithic Petri dish of people and their stories.

This was not the summer I intended; I should have been in far flung cities or in the nation’s capital to document the shootings. But instead, frustratingly I was trapped alone in my own home. Even more dangerously, I was trapped in my own mind. Medical insurance had fortunately taken care of the bills from my injury, and the agency had gotten the paper to agree to pay me a small allowance to prevent me from suing them. It was on a job for them that I was injured after all. Twelve weeks of recuperation, six weeks where I couldn’t leave my apartment, six weeks of shuffling awkwardly from bed to chair, from chair to bed, again, and again, over, and over until it felt like I lost track of not just time, but life itself.

I had the TV of course and the radio for comfort and connection. But none of this went any way to tackle my isolation, my hunger for human contact. In that summer, that hot, sticky, suffocating summer I found my connection thin, my grip on reality wavering. Until she came to me. Then, my reality was never the same again.

jen’s apartment

chapter

one

Sweat rolls down my lower back, as my linen shirt clings to my heated flesh. Cursing my lack of air conditioning again, a luxury even in this day and age. I shuffle in my chair, better positioning myself in front of the fan. The sound of the loud blades no longer bothers me with their tuneless hum. Long has it faded into the background noise along with the news that had been rolling on the TV all morning. The monotony of the news anchor delivering good and bad news with the same emotionless candor stood at odds with the brightly colored graphics paraded across the screen. This is why I preferred the papers and internet forums, no voice to derail my opinions. No affliction of another person's opinions to impact my own. They spoke of the hottest summer in recent history, the lack of breeze making the weather stick long and hard while the sun baked the asphalt on the New York sidewalk below. Not that I would feel the direct sun on my skin, or the inferno of the subway. I was here, trapped in my apartment. My connection to the outside world, tenuous at best and fading more each day as I stayed locked in my fourth-floor tomb.

The summer air is motionless and heavy with sticky humid heat. It has forced windows open wide, stretching into the night like spread insect wings; pushed back curtains, lifted blinds and generally brought the neighborhood life into a sweltering intimacy unlike anything I had ever seen before. Everything felt on the cusp of something greater, like something bubbling just under the surface. For the first time I got a look at the people living around me in a way I had never seen before, a look behind their own layers of privacy. It was addictive watching them go about their routines, scuttling like bugs against the sun heated concrete.

Until a few weeks ago I had loved my city tenement, the small apartment anonymous among the hundreds of others. All identical in their makeup, each filled with a different life, a different person, a whole world of desires hidden behind double locked faceless doors. It's how I liked it, being a no one among the masses, another face to forget and slip past, it made my job much easier when people never recognized or remembered me from behind the camera.

It always fascinated me that most of the people I pass in the street had probably seen something I had made, had seen a major life event through the same lens I had created. They had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall in the reality I had made for them; they had seen the LA riots under the same dark thick smoke I had inhaled. Images I had captured were plastered across the world in print and on TV screens. I had influenced how people saw the world around them change.

I had helped them decide who to vote for, who to feel sympathy for and who to vilify in the court of public opinion - yet not even one of them knew my face or my name. It's how I preferred it, I was an anonymous voyeur on human life.

Carefully I switch chairs tearing my blurry unfocussed eyes away from the assault of color on the TV set to the newest addition to my life, the state-of-the-art iMac, still weeks away from public release. Its transparent blue curves promise a futurism not unlike the atomic age of the 60s. I briefly saw my reflection in the domed dark screen, my eyes already sunken and hollow against my pale skin. It had only been a week since I last felt the sun on my face, but it was already taking its toll. I should probably attempt to wash my hair before anyone knocks on the door and assumes I am a permanent shut-in on the 8th floor, rather than an unwilling prisoner of my own circumstance.

With the fan now blowing its tempered air down the back of my neck I click the tactile button. I’m still getting used to having all this space on my desk, this machine was a lot smaller than the tower and monitor I had been using; but the news desk had given me this as a peace offering, another desperate attempt for me not to claw millions out of them for damages. In truth I never really was interested in the money but the more things they threw at me to cover their tracks the more I leant into it. Here was a computer designed to change the world, filled with software I had agreed due to test, including some new photo manipulation program, designed to work seamlessly with our new digital cameras - all created to remove the human aspect of my work. To take away the tactile nature, to remove my physical presence from the images. I could see the future coming, this photo-manipulated future of 0s and 1s where the chemicals no longer leached into my clothing and I wouldn't lose hours to the dark room. I would miss it, the shift in senses, moving focus from the outside world to inner thoughts, quiet calm, nothing but you and the developing image.

But the future was coming at an alarming speed. My future.

The whirring and clicking of mechanical drives springs to life as the display flickers on with a charming note, organic in nature, and so out of place in my space.

My apartment is small, functional at best. Two armchairs take up much of my living space, mismatching and overly soft with age. A TV cabinet takes up the inner wall, the glowing box sitting surrounded by books and records, while the other side of my small living space is filled with a large window. My gateway to the outside world. My daydreaming of the outside world is interrupted by a mechanical sound from deep in the curved plastic machine.

It takes a moment for the program to recognize my login details and load my profile, even longer for me to connect to the internet itself. Not that I could complain, computers have been a part of my life for well over a decade now. I had never really seen the point in them, offering no real change to my life - that was until I started to use the world wide web. The internet had opened my world and everyone else's to new possibilities, new ways to access news and sport, and ways to communicate I was certain hadn't even been conceived yet. Yes, the internet was the thing that excited me about computers, the whole world at my fingertips. And in this moment, my only real connection to the outside world.

Emails, already the bane of my existence as they sang at me to alert me of new ‘electronic mail’ the charming human nature to find all tasks relatable still amused me. Far more than the hollow voice that informed me of the emails sat in my inbox. They all bored me, some from the office, others shouting at me about sales offers no different to the obnoxious TV adverts I hated. I dealt with them quickly before turning my attention to the real reason I had moved to the computer. I had found new company in my solitude, no longer relying on the physical presence of someone to have a conversation. Chat rooms had become my new regular hangout much like a bar might have been in real life, a group of like-minded people could interact and discuss the world from the comfort of their own home. This was revolutionary.

chapter

two

This forum was dedicated to people who had a passion for photography, and while it was my job I couldn't deny my love for it. Here I had the chance to talk to like-minded people in numbers far higher than I would find locally.

I wait for the chatroom to load, the black screen with a green blinking cursor tells me it’s ready for my first message.

L3NS_72: Hi everyone.

A few moments pass as my message is sent across the world in an instant, and replies start trickling in.

Randy: Hi

SpiderM4n: Hello

BiggDa66y: Welcome back!