Status Updates From The Photographer's Truth

This is briliant ❤️! So much briliant that I re-read paragraphs!

You know when your heart squeezes and you feel like there is a weight on your chest and you can’t breathe properly? This has been me, the whole time reading this. 💔

I can sense this book is going to break my heart.

For a long time after college, my life existed in binary. Black or white. On or off. It was either one thing or it was not. No grey areas. No blur. I had created a life built on simplicity. For me, simplicity was elegance. I never thought back to that night in Hotel 17 with Vince and it never occurred to me that my need for the certainty of a black and white world might somehow be connected to it.

Thinking back over that night, I search for clues to how I felt. I look for inklings of guilt or some sense of foreboding as we lay there on that dingy hotel bed, knocking CD cases and bags of chips to the floor, discovering each others bodies. But I had none. There was no sense of doom or shame, not until the next morning.

I felt like I had never really witnessed passion and loneliness before that moment. The powerful black and white images, the ghost of hope in the men’s faces, the way Mapplethorpe captured a split second in time and used it to illustrate love and lust and loneliness and comfort all at once - it was a revelation to me.

The first few sentences of an exceptional novel capture the reader's attention and set the tone for everything that follows. These first two intriguing sentences that open Ralph Josiah Bardsley’s ‘The Photographer’s Truth’ do just that.

“The first time I saw a Mapplethorpe print, I was twenty years old. It was my junior year in college, and I had gone with my roommate to New York City on spring break.”

A hopeful ending...

*4.5 Stars* rounded up

Stunning book that had me falling in love (with Paris) even as I wished for a more rounded, deeper exploration of Luca and Ian’s developing relationship.

What an amazing project to be part of. And in Paris too.

For those who didn't know, like me, Robert Mapplethorpe is the name behind this beauty. I got curious, went digging and now I'm completely amazed and in love with his art.

H O O K E D.

This has been coming for so long, and it was just really sad and right and true at the same time.

I want to know how this ends so bad. Everything seems possible.

This is me right now ;-)

Beginning of Book 2: In Paris

this is so good, I can't even :)

Oh my, this is stunning. Gripping from the very first sentence. And so touching as well. Already brought out all the goose bumps by all the feelz. This is going to be awesome.