Hands

By Meera Sethi

Hands always find each other. It's hard to take a picture of just one hand, because the other is always inches away: holding the pad of paper onto which its fellow spills ideas, curling into a mirror-image fist of the first, tangling itself into the comb of another's fingers. One hand is ever settling itself over the other like a protector, like a comforter. A person's hands are gentle with each other because they have to be. They need each other.

Photo By Meera Lee Sethi

Together they hold, squeeze, stroke, tickle, rub; they are love's agents and its interpreters. In a heartbeat they can become soldiers of hurt that punch and scratch and rip and shake and slap. Emotions may have no shape, but with our hands we try to give it to them anyway. A woman's fingers flutter like flags as she searches for the right word to say; her hands are already voicing it. A man's hands fly out before him, bird-wings rising on the air of his excitement. He speaks with his hands, we say, and it is almost not a metaphor.

Idle, a hand stretches out for a pen, a toothpick, a camera, other hands -- for a hand is born empty and straightaway seeks to be filled. It holds a life's potential worth and wears its history, too, in rivers of wrinkles and in the stiffness of fingers that used to furl and unfurl like flowers. Hands choose what to pick up and what to throw away, what to hold on to like a treasure. How to pray for what is longed for. Hands are creators, fixers, recorders. They are the proud badges of our humanity and our power in the world; no wonder the lens is drawn to them.

Photo By Brenda Anderson

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but who will open the soul's door? Who will turn the key in its lock to keep you out? In a portrait, hands can be trickier than faces -- they speak, yes, but first you have to understand their language and hands are sometimes skittish, hard to catch, as nervous as a twitching lip. Still. Let your camera drop from the face to the lap and sooner or later fear recedes from the eyes, vanity fades or is baffled. A person's hands may do or they may be, but it is hard for them to pretend. How should a pair of hands wear a false expression? Could it remember bad pictures of itself from awkward adolescence, and stiffen? Our hands are what they are - strong, supple, deft, full of tact, and naked. A portrait of someone's hands is always a nude.

Photo By Meera Lee Sethi

The hands that hold the camera know this, too. They curve around the camera body like twin smiles, working in a silence of kindness and everlasting affection for their subject: finding intimacy, focusing on it, sliding up to the shutter release button and freezing it. They too are full of grace and eloquence. I speak with my hands, I am telling you, and it is almost not a metaphor.