John Limon is one of those people you hear a lot about at Harvard, but rarely come across. Someone who gets into Harvard because he's a mathematical whiz and then goes on to graduate summa cum laude in English literature. Someone who comes in as a shy and reclusive freshman and leaves with three good friends and lots of acquaintances among students and faculty. Someone who ignores the college literary scene and all the undergraduate publications -- Advocate, Crimson, Independent, Lampoon -- and then has two finished novels making the rounds of publishers in New York when he gets his diploma.

I met him during a year that he had taken off to finish his second novel, and hired him to help me sort negatives. I liked him right away -- though I said to myself, this is someone with a vicious eye for detail, God help me if he ever makes fun of me in anything he writes.

Most of my pictures of John are the last exposures on a roll of film of someone else. This would happen when he was working in my living room when I'd come home from a day of shooting. Let me finish this roll of film on you, I'd say.

John doesn't look like his picture of himself, although it's the best picture of him I have. Of course, he must have looked something like he looks here, at least for the instant of the exposure. But it's not the whole picture.

This confusion about what is/what appears to be, this ambiguity, is what attracts me to photography in general and to portrait photography in particular. Portrait photographs aren't the whole person, the real person. They are one mini-second, only as representative as any other mini-second would be. Because the camera gives us a tangible record of what just happened, that instant has an authority of its own. We can hold a piece of paper in our hand. We attribute reality to portrait photographs because they take off from the actual, have elements of what we call real. They are immediately recognizable. Portraits seem true, too, because we know the person had to have been there.in front of the lens for the image to register on the film (unlike a painting where the subject and painter can be on opposite sides of the globe). If John was there on the couch while I opened the camera shutter, that's his face, his jacket, how can I say he doesn't really look like the picture'?

It's that insistence on presence, the participation of the subject, that gives that misleading sense of definition to the portrait. We endow portrait photographs with all kinds of mystical/spiritual qualities. They seem so real and yet they're no more real than blatant fantasy. It's all resemblances, and it's all time. We are given this evidence of an instant when we all know time is a continuum. The photograph is an exquisite metaphor, a delicate haiku of memory.

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