The Taste of a Lemon

On Portraiture

Try to describe what a fresh Amalfi lemon tastes like, picked straight from the tree.

You’ll start with the taste and realise almost immediately that the taste is the smallest part of it. It’s the smell of the leaves baking in the sun. The soil breathing in the heat. Salt in the air from a sea you can hear but not see. The shade beneath the trees and the life it provides, the particular quality of light that seems to exist only there. The lemon is never one thing. It’s everything around it, held in one small yellow weight in your hand.

Now watch people meet that lemon.

Some just eat it. They don’t question it because they don’t need to. It is, and they are, and that’s enough. Some reach for language, turning the taste over, searching for the words that might hold it, because naming things is how they touch the world. Others simply breathe it all in and go skipping off intoxicated by the experience.

The same lemon. Three people. None of them are wrong. Each of them showing you exactly who they are, not in what they say about the lemon, but in the way they meet it.

I’ve spent my life watching that moment. The instant between a person and the thing in front of them, before any performance has time to arrive. It took me years to realise this is what I’d been photographing all along.

Because that’s what a portrait is.

Not what someone looks like.

How they meet what’s in front of them.

The face is just where it shows.

This is why I struggle to explain what I’m looking for when I make a legacy portrait. People ask, and every answer I give collapses into a box that’s too small. The moment the guard drops. A thought becoming visible. Something that feels a little like soul. All of it true, and none of it quite right, because the thing only exists while it remains unnamed. The moment I tell someone exactly what I’m waiting for, they’ll try to perform it, and it disappears.

I could take what isn’t offered. But it would be forced, and forced moments have never interested me.

So I sit. I watch. I wait. I know.

The sitter has to show me who they are. Not pretend. Not perform. There’s no technique that extracts it and no direction that summons it. It arrives the way taste arrives in the grove, all at once, made of everything, impossible to reduce to its parts.

It’s the same as love, in that way. Ask someone why they love who they love and watch them fail beautifully to answer. It’s never one thing. It’s everything, seen through one face.

That’s what I’m after. Not the lemon.

The grove.