Double Exposure by Brian Caswell

the wall-hooks, or set up on makeshift easels throughout the space, are the creations he’s been working on so secretively for the past weeks and months.
    It’s a mixed-media concept exhibition. Photographs and artwork arranged in complementary pairs.
    Words rise, but they hang frozen in the gap between thought and tongue. Unmoving, I take in the scope of what he has done.
    I want to cry and laugh at the same time, to release the breath that has stalled in my chest. Instead, I just stare.
    â€˜Well?’ He has moved up beside me. In that single word hovers the artist’s trepidation. His fear of failure.
    Slowly, I am drawn towards the freestanding pairing nearest me. The black-and-white photograph is of an old man slumped asleep against a graffiti-daubed wall. His clothes are threadbare and mismatched, a woollen cap is pulled down over his ears and fingerless gloves protect his hands. The edge of an old shopping trolley is visible out of focus at the edge of the frame, but the complex shadow it casts falls hard-edged across the pavement at the old man’s feet, looking for all the world like the bars of a jail-cell.
    In the frame beside the photo is a drawing, highlighted in charcoal and pastels, of a figure frozen in the same pose, head bowed, legs stretched out, hands lying loosely at his sides.
    But there the similarity of the images ends.
    In the drawing, the old man is transformed. The wall is gone, replaced by an armchair in front of a quarter-paned window that opens onto the blurred suggestion of a garden. A footstool stands in substitution of the hard pavement and the jail-bar shadow of the original image is transmuted into a patterned rug beside an open fire. The cap has disappeared, revealing a down of white hair, and the old man is dressed in a loose shirt and comfortable pants. Slippers replace the scuffed and worn shoes of the photograph.
    The contrast is shattering.
    I move on.
    Two young lovers stand, eyes locked, fingers gently touching, silhouetted against the spray of a fountain, while in the frame beside them their images have aged. Wrinkled hands touch with familiarity, the fountain has become a tree in autumn and the young shoulders have stooped slightly in the transformation.
    But the eyes … Somehow he has made them shine, brighter than the original and as youthful, even within their mask of wrinkles, and the blush of attraction in the youthful faces has become a shared expression of a far deeper … understanding.
    I move from pair to pair, drinking in the power of my brother’s imagery. Romantic at times, idealised, but then, without warning, the vision that darkens.
    The young boy, crouched over his toys in the sand of the sunlit playground, becomes, in pastels of grey and brown, the twenty-something soldier cowering in despair, his gun held loosely by its strap in nerveless hands, while the starburst of a shell illuminates the battlefield around him.
    The girl of ten or twelve is captured by the lens with the chaos of the shopping mall muted, out of focus, behind her. Her eyes are fixed on something that has made her smile. In her hands she holds a bag containing something new and precious and expensive.
    While beside her on the drought-cracked soil of another land, her sister image stands dark-skinned and naked, hands clasped empty before her, while in the middle distance a dog searches the rubbish for food.
    And at the end of the room, illuminated by the shaft of sunlight falling from the huge window, a young prostitute leans suggestively against a pole, her eyes staring a direct challenge into the camera, an out-of-focus neon glaring like a mock-halo around her head. But here, for once, the pattern is broken, for in the companion space beside the full-length photograph, he has chosen a different perspective.
    Filling the frame, the girl’s face is reproduced in oils, beautiful, like a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, the colours rich, the detail immaculate, in her eyes a