Once you’ve made the big jump into life, your own life, there is no going back. You must move on, down, up, just live. You have to deal with his contradictory feelings of pleasure and terror. With no going back.

The only moments when one can escape this fatality, abstract oneself from this perpetual movement, are those which are often called “out of time”. It can be an ecstasy in front of a landscape, a loss of means during a romantic encounter, or quite simply this special feeling in front of a work of art. Like those bungee jumpers who know the terror of falling followed by the joy of weightlessness, there is this brief and sublime moment, between the ascent and the new fall, when you float, nothing moves and you savor suspended time. I call it levitation. It is time stolen from time. It is also a beautiful metaphor for photography, a sublime means of making life levitate: no matter the chaos before or the promise of love after, photography removes its subject from the continuum of life, it levitates him forever.