Bronx, New York-based photographer Gus Aronson’s, “Eurydice” brings together various observations from life, interpreting the act of photographing through the lens of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the myth goes, a bereaved Orpheus travels to the underworld in hopes of retrieving his recently deceased wife, Eurydice. He strikes a deal with Hades in which Orpheus can guide Eurydice home from the underworld, so long as he does not turn back to look at her until they reach the world of the living. Overcome by excitement, he can’t help himself—when he turns to look at her, Eurydice disappears, condemned to the underworld forever. 

Aronson wonders: “Does the attention we pay to the world around us when we photograph destroy the inherent truth of it, as it was when Orpheus looked back at Eurydice? Is our attempt to understand the world by preserving it through a photograph only a fleeting attempt for survival in the face of eschatological thought? Or does photography—the act of looking itself—render the opaque into a living clarified truth through poetic action?”

See more from “Eurydice” below.