“I’m tired of intimacy. Not intimacy itself because we need intimacy to survive, but the idea of intimacy — the facade, the parade, the discussion. Real intimacy cannot be pictured, the years of ageing together, laughing together, crying together, having secrets together — shared experiences that would never be interesting to others.
I had a best friend when I was a child. We used to spend days, maybe weeks, talking and laughing and loving and teasing and fighting and sometimes even trying to kill each other, seriously, and endlessly discussing the worlds we wanted to build. When we grew up, we grew so far apart that we didn’t speak for 20 years. I recently learned that he almost died in a terrible motorcycle accident. When I read about it on Facebook, I sobbed uncontrollably and alone. Was my sadness intimacy? Maybe his sister’s Facebook post was intimacy. Is it intimacy to ‘like’ someone’s picture? Maybe intimacy is leaving a comment or sending a ‘DM’ or just responding to an email on time. These days intimacy looks a lot like whatever you see when someone answers your unannounced FaceTime call.
“I had a boyfriend, once. I told him my darkest secrets. We broke up 10 years ago and haven’t spoken very much since. Recently, he emailed me out of nowhere to inform me that his dad had died. I think his email was intimacy.
“For a long time, I searched for intimacy I could show in photographs. I never found what I was looking for because, like all humans, I need actual intimacy, not just pictures of it. So as an antidote to all this ‘intimacy,’ I covered myself in a full-colour suit because the colour was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.
“I call this series of pictures Orchid — a project about what to do when public space is a dangerous place. It is a series of pictures about abstraction and freedom of thought. In these pictures, I am escaping intimacy — the idea, not the actual thing. I am seeking refuge in anonymity because in quarantine intimacy ‘looks’ a lot like a popularity contest and not like the thing we need. In quarantine, intimacy ‘looks’ like a crowded Zoom call your friend posted on Instagram.
“I hope the privacy of quarantine and this picture of me in a red suit embracing a blue bush in Arizona at sunset inspires you to be a little more honest about what and who brings you real joy and not just ‘intimacy’. The things we need have a way of finding us when we’re free to be ourselves.”
matthewmorrocco.com