“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
— Maya Angelou, The Human Family
An Unspoken Tenderness, Pebble Beach, CA, 2019
8x10 Exhibition, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, 2026
Today, we celebrate the International Day of Peace and the world seems to have forgotten how to be gentle. That's why I made An Unspoken Tenderness. I did not want to make an image about peace in the usual way. I chose to stay away from doves, olive branches, or grand gestures reaching toward the heavens. Those symbols have carried their meanings faithfully for centuries. I wanted a more quiet image.
I started with a white flower. Then, I imagined two hands meeting.
The flower seems almost suspended in a place between darkness and light. Its petals open without argument, asking nothing of anyone. Behind it, the hands hold one another with an understanding that requires no translation. They are not meant to prove anything. They are simply there.
Is this where peace begins? Can it begin when there is no agreement about everything? Or when our differences still remain? I have never believed that acceptance requires us to become alike. A garden would be a rather dull place if every flower insisted on being the same flower, don't you think?
Peace, to me, is the willingness to leave room for another person to exist as they are.
Friendship, love, and compassion begin there.
We encounter someone whose history we do not know, whose fears may be different from ours, whose beliefs may occasionally make us want to reach for a very long explanatory footnote. Yet somehow, we can still choose curiosity over suspicion, patience over anger, and kindness over the convenient comfort of dividing the world into us and them.
The hands in my image are deliberately anonymous. They could belong to anyone. Perhaps that is important. They are not portraits of particular people because peace does not belong to a particular group, nation, religion, generation, or ideology.
It belongs to all of us.
I have always thought of my photographs as unfinished stories, invitations for viewers to bring their own memories and meanings into the work. With this image, I find myself wondering what happens when we allow another person's story to enter ours without immediately trying to rewrite it.
Maybe compassion is simply that: making room.
The world is noisy enough. Perhaps what we need now is not another declaration, but a quieter language.
A hand reaching for another hand.
A flower opening in the dark.
And the courage to hold on.
Artist Statement
An Unspoken Tenderness is my reflection on peace as something intimate rather than monumental. I chose the white flower as a quiet presence, something fragile that continues to open even within darkness. The hands behind it represent the simplest human language I know: connection. They suggest friendship, love, acceptance, tolerance, and the willingness to recognize another person without demanding that they become like us.
The image is deliberately ambiguous and incomplete, as much of my work is. I want the viewer to enter the space between the flower and the hands and bring their own memories and emotions with them. For me, the photograph becomes a meditation on what we might discover when we replace suspicion with curiosity and division with compassion.
Perhaps peace does not always arrive as a grand gesture. Perhaps sometimes it begins quietly, with one person reaching for another.
This framed piece is part of Center for Photographic Art's 8x10 Exhibition and Auction. You can bid here: https://bid.igavelauctions.com/item/7282844
Angelou's poem explores both our differences and our fundamental human kinship. The quotation is documented by the Poetry Foundation in its discussion of The Human Family.