SAJA LUGU The story of One Hundred

A photographer stands in the center of a stranger’s living room. Just a short time ago, they knew nothing about each other. The photographer had read a rather brief introduction about the individual: he is searching for something, for a feeling, and something about the introduction touched him. Now, he is staring outside through his host’s window. There is something very personal about the situation, even intimate. Strewn across the autumn grass are toys of the child giggling inside, slightly further away is a folded garden chair leaning against a shed, awaiting spring. They have just had a long conversation and an entire life story has been opened up before the photographer: no, it was not a confession-like monologue (that would be rather unorthodox for an Estonian, even after a hundred years of statehood), but in pauses, tones, smiles, and neutral expressions that all wonderfully summarize the present. It is in these moments that the photographer feels he has gotten closer to this person than to perhaps many whom he calls a friend or relative. And he has gotten close to something else. For later, when he is driving back home along dusky roads, when seas of scrub and grey tree trunks are shooting past the car windows, when he is all alone with his own thoughts, everything resembles the words of an Estonian poet: “something is glowing, glinting and pulsing / beyond the faraway forests”. That enigmatic “something” blends with another word that suddenly comes to mind: “society”, which has acquired a clearer and more powerful significance in the course of the photographer’s thunderous conversations…