Blessed, 2026
Letter from Ellis Wren
Dear Robert,
I hope you won’t mind a note from a stranger.
Some time ago, I read your essay “I Framed the Photo, and the Photo Framed the Loop.” It stayed with me longer than I expected. You suggested that photographs sometimes catch a pattern people are living inside without quite knowing it. That seemed worth testing. So I thought I might try looking carefully at one of your images and writing down what turns up.
The photograph is “Blessed, 2026.”
It’s a quiet picture. A man from behind. Short hair. A shoulder strap. A bottle in his hand. Nothing about the setting tries to impress you. What’s missing, of course, is the face.
Photographs usually begin there. We look for eyes, expression, some hint of who the person might be. Here, there’s none of that. The head is turned away, and where a face might tell us something, we’re given a single word instead.
Just below the hairline, in dark script, is the word Blessed.
What struck me is that the word isn’t meant for him. He can’t really see it without a mirror. It faces whoever happens to be behind him, which is exactly where the camera stands.
So the photograph places us directly behind him, in the one position from which the word can be read.
I found myself wondering about that word. Not in any religious sense, exactly. More in the ordinary way people use it now. Sometimes it means gratitude. Sometimes survival. Sometimes it’s simply a way of saying that things could have gone worse.
Meanwhile, the rest of the picture keeps moving along in its own direction. The bottle suggests thirst. The strap suggests a bag or some weight being carried. The shoulders lean slightly forward, as if the man is on his way somewhere.
The word sounds settled. The life around it doesn’t.
Maybe that’s what the photograph catches: a moment where someone has labeled himself, chosen a name for his condition, while life itself keeps unfolding, one step after another.
In any case, that’s what I saw standing behind him for a moment.
If you don’t mind, I may write again the next time one of your photographs gives me something to think about.
Best,
—Ellis Wren
Interesting...to me, it brought to mind a similar impression, in many ways.
When deciding to have a particular image or word tattooed - a pretty significant decision, given the difficulty involved in erasing it should our perspective shift markedly in the impossible-to-predict future - in that moment the image or word has relevance and importance to us.
The guy in the photo might just be pensive, but he might equally be seen as sad...and not feeling blessed in this moment at all...
Stories, stories...and everything transient...🈚️🫶
The verb blesser in french is to hurt or wound. A blessure is a wound. Not that this was the intention of the tatooee, but, as someone whose story is bilingual, this came to mind