Pictures of people, spontaneously captured street scenes, the eyes with happy, melancholic, thoughtful, and occasionally flirtatious gazes, mostly turned towards that which Peter's photography hides from the viewer. What the pictures convey, then, is not that on which the protagonists from the street direct their sight. Only a few of these scenes resolve themselves for the eye of the beholder; rather, they evoke questions whose answers I try to divine from the gaze of the people in focus.

 

Peter tells his stories of urban life on the streets in black and white, the faces appear unadorned and authentic, their profound expressions touching. As a viewer, I am drawn into the spell of these faces without them ever giving me a glance. And precisely because they elude direct observation, I begin to take many of them into my heart unawares. Would also like to feel the joy, the rapturous oblivion of the world, or the infatuation that their looks express.

 

Plain, and for that very reason so unambiguous, the faces in the photographs portray the richness of human emotions, unarticulated longings, and diverse moods. Perhaps that is the point: it is not important “what it is” that all these people in the pictures are looking at exactly, but rather what it does to them and brings forth in them through their contemplation of it. 

 

Many of these pictures remind me of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:

 

How shall I hold my soul 

that it does not touch on yours? 

How shall I lift it above thee to other things? 

Oh, I would like to lodge it 

with something lost in the dark, 

in some strange, silent place 

that does not vibrate on, 

when your depths vibrate... 

 

To be touched is the essence of being alive. Peter’s pictures touch and thus forcefully contradict Rilke’s idea (which he himself rejects towards the end of the poem) of placing one's soul in a strange, silent place, even if at times there may be a subliminal urge to do so.