TITLE: Still...

The girl has a question for the boy: "How much do you love me?"
He thinks for a moment, then quietly replies, "As much as a train whistle in the night."
She waits in silence for him to go on. Obviously there has to be a story there.

- Murakami Haruki, Feb 1995 – “Concerning the Sound of a Train Whistle in the Night or On the Efficacy of Fiction”. Translated by Michael Emmerich.

What is love? An entirely impossible question to answer I realized immediately after writing it. But, that is what makes it such an important one. Love cannot be defined. It is both an essential part of the human experience as well as an entirely personal one. It mutates through time and our relationships with different people. It unites and divides us.

The images in this series are in part taken in camera, in part manipulated. Elements of truth and constructed fictions collide. The Still project is an attempt to tell a story that started with a kiss that never actually happened. Yet, I replay over and over again in my mind decades after standing on that street corner in that rainy city neither of us has been to for many years. It is an attempt to answer a question she has never asked me but hovers around all of our conversations.

Someone I held dear once said to me that love isn’t everything. My mind agreed but my soul screamed of course it is. It was her way of rationalizing the end of our relationship. Love is hope. The belief that the seemingly impossible may yet be possible. Still… the most compelling lies we tell ourselves are made up almost entirely of the truth.

AUTHOR: Philip LePage (Canada)

Philip LePage (1996 BA Art History) was born in 1969 in Northern Canada but left in 1994 and remained in Europe and Asia for 13 years. He currently lives on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Photography for Philip LePage is very centered on the contradictions inherent in ideas of home, identity and belonging. He thinks of photography as a journey between two worlds. A middle ground that separates and joins at the same time; a liminal space.