Hands

text by Emma Pizarro, images by Nancy Graham

Hands are one of our most expressive body parts, second only perhaps to eyes in their ability to silently convey what we think and how we feel. Hand gestures augment our speech, adding emphasis like punctuation and helping others to decipher our meaning. Our hands weave into the ways we intentionally use our bodies to express ideas about ourselves, but they also act as inadvertent conduits of our personal stories. Callouses and scars, quick-bitten nails and weathered skin can all lay clues to our work, lifestyles, habits; our past traumas and misadventures. 

It may be trite to observe the clench of a fist or busy, fidgeting fingers and interpret these as suppressed frustration or nervous energy, but I think we often channel our emotions through our hands, revealing a fair amount about our inner states. Without any words exchanged, hands can tell stories about their possessor’s relationship with the world and hint at the acts of effort, compassion and pleasure which they might engage in.

The potential of hands to be equally creator and destroyer, carer and tormentor, seems to mirror the teetering balance of our nature as humans. They are capable of lighting up another’s skin with languorous caresses as with strikes that smart with a stinging injustice. Our hands serve us in our everyday activities; they are functional and mundane, allowing us to navigate practical tasks without thought. And yet they also delight with their playfulness, in the ways we can choose to use them for indulgent and superfluous means.  

There is a particular fascination with the physical form of hands which I reserve for no other body part in isolation. The attraction which other parts of the body might hold is likely predicated on their context: the gentle suggestion of a ribcage protruding from a side-stretched torso, the well of a collarbone giving way to the soft curve of the neck, or the tensed contraction of a calf muscle anticipating motion. I have no such qualifying conditions for hands. In and of themselves I find them beautiful; strong and soft and firm and gentle all at once. 

There is much loveliness in the bone and sinew of hands, in the strain of skin pulled taut over knuckles, in deep-furrowed lines and papery skin peppered with liver spots. Watching the flow of hands in motion can be mesmerising: their graceful contours as they shift and contort; the delicate eroticism of lithe, reaching fingers. There is a real tenderness in witnessing another using their hands for you. 

I love photographs of hands where they have been manipulated into almost unnatural positions to create precise, rigid shapes and cut off from their bodily context, or where hands have become the unexpected focus of the composition, conveying a feeling or detail which might otherwise be lost or at odds with the scene around them; images by surrealist Dora Maar and hands captured in the street photography of Vivian Maier were the visual prompts which led to these recent reflections. 

Our ability to use touch to communicate and relate to the world around us, and how innate and fundamental an action this is for many people, has been brought into sharp focus by how restricted our physical interactions currently are. We lay healing hands on the ailing and we squeeze the hand of a loved one to comfort, reaching with empathy into the pockets of sorrow which lone words struggle to penetrate. Feeling the physicality of another through hands joined in unity can assuage fear; a vivid recollection of hands clasped urgently together can generate the same hot flush of electricity as at the very moment when fingers entwined. 

In extreme anxiety, our sense of touch can anchor us to reality, confirming the continued existence of the material world when a cacophonous rush of thoughts distorts our perception. As small children we are taught that adult hands represent safety and security, that they will protect us from harm. To twist free of the clutch of your parent’s hand was an act of rebellion, at once an immediate breaking of a physical bond and a defiant assertion of premature autonomy. Hands permitted to touch another allow us to push up against the delineation of personal space, to signify allegiance or symbiosis, and to reach toward transcending the boundary between self and other. The aesthetic appeal of hands has always seemed evident to me but, in our present situation, I have found myself reflecting increasingly on the symbolic significance of hands and the beauty inherent in touch, and how we are missing their subtle promise of connection.