“Stories are everywhere, you just have to look for them.”

“Everybody has at least one novel in them.”

And so the aphorisms continue.

As I see it, people are stories – living embodiments of interwoven narrative and character, always evolving through thoughts and actions. Often we only get to glimpse a single chapter, scene, or just a sentence of someone’s story. That fleeting, curtailed perspective perhaps suggests loss by way of its incompleteness. Perhaps not. The fragments we manage to share posses a unique perfection all their own.

We can maniplate and obfuscate all we want, but we always leave a storied wake. And as much as it’s hard to understand the fullness of someone else’s world, our own introspection is likewise outpaced by our own ceaseless evolution. So those scattered chapters, scenes and sentences have enormous value as something graspable. A trail of treasures suggesting a chest of riches we’ll never actually find. We all have a compulsion to fill the gaps, to ponder questions that may never be answered, to imagine what the full reality of someone’s world might be, even our own. And thus we constantly nourish our curiosity for one another. It’s a tantalising dance.

Encapsulating someone’s story as a photo, a film, a book, or a documentary offers opportunity to pause with whatever fragments we’ve managed to seize, to freeze things articificially in a moment of reflection. Of course, the full bounty will never reveal itself. Inextinguishable, irresistible mystery will persist in all its glorious tenacity. Therein lies a quintessential beauty of our being human, ever-bound in our mutual foxtrot of sharing and intrigue.

The stories compiled below are momentary reflections on individuals I’ve had the pleasure to know. People whose embodiment of spirit, perspective and narrative I found deeply compelling.