The Notebook
When an Image Looks Back
Looking appears innocent until it no longer is. A photograph can begin as a record and end as evidence, desire, currency, threat or memory. The image itself does not necessarily change. What changes is the structure of power around it.
That shift sits at the centre of I Lost My Head. The novel asks not only what we see, but who is allowed to look, who may keep what has been seen, and who gets to decide what an image means once it begins to circulate. The camera is an instrument, but it is also a boundary.
There is a difference between access and entitlement. Possessing an image does not mean possessing a right over the person, body or story it contains. In a time when almost anything can be copied, sent and replicated instantly, that difference is harder to defend and therefore more important.
Custody is a less dramatic word than desire, but perhaps a deeper one. To keep custody is not simply to hide. It is to accept that some things demand responsibility after they have been seen. An image does not stop existing when the camera is lowered. Sometimes that is the moment when it truly begins to exist.
This is why the torsos in the novel are not decorative illustrations. They are bodies that contain, reveal and conceal at once. Absence is also part of the narrative. What is missing can exert as much pressure as what is present.
In the end, I Lost My Head returns to a simple idea: some images do not disappear when they are no longer seen. They simply wait. The question is what we do while they wait.