My Love Is a Thread Tied to You

Book excerpt: Can a photograph tell a love story? Countless pages have been written to describe how photography captures a fleeting instant in time and holds it as individual lives and whole histories unfold. In viewing a photograph, we continually shift from the awareness of a moment to the perspective of memory. Isn't this also the experience of love? Passion, loyalty, wonder, and more are felt towards a beloved intensely in the moment, but love also extends to encompass a complex of feelings and events experienced over time, committed to memory, and transcending life spans. In this most poetic sense, photographs might not only tell love stories, they can embody them. Embodied love is photographer Paula Gately Tillman's pursuit in My Love Is a Thread Tied to You.In 2019, Paula revisited the picturesque towns and hotels in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to which she and her late husband, LeRoy E. Hoffberger (1925-2016), traveled during their courtship and marriage. Through this physical return, Paula enacted the conceptual workings of photography, a medium that compels our gaze and our thoughts to return over and over again to sites of past significance. She photographed her journey, entwining the resulting images with hand-written notes and other recollections of her life with Roy to create this artist's book.A moving meditation on love emerges from Paula's ethereal images of hotel draperies, furniture, and antiques. These delicate subjects contain a tactile beauty that conjures up the intimacies of shared domestic life all the while conveying the absence of those people who once touched and used them. Photographs of remote castles, mountain mist, and trees that seem to blossom while they weep are juxtaposed with interior views. These are fairy tale scenes witnessed in real life, much the way dreams merge with reality in a great romance.- Kristen HilemanIndependent Curator