Pictures of hands make a freestanding genre of photography. Some operators take older hands for subjects, making the work more likely to succeed; even relaxed digits of elderly humans reveal character and tell a personal story. An electronic search reveals pictures of human hands in the hundreds of thousands: for instance, feminine hands hold flowers with exaggerated tenderness as one would cradle a precious artifact; or a woman strangely caresses thin air, her two hands intertwined, making love to one another. Examples quickly diversify and become more and more peculiar.

Hands are represented wearing silicone gloves in a fetishistic manner. Hands with fingernails done up in acrylic and wild motifs appear and are quickly overwhelmed by more of the same. There are portfolios confined to the hands of guitarists picking, plucking and strumming, whose movements appear as interchangeable as machine parts. I noticed a special sub-population: photographs of African men holding the white hands of Caucasian women — one photo-bank offers 6,000 of these images for use free of charge. More stylish and much in vogue we find hands in the foreground uplifted in various attitudes toward the sky, which might be rendered in twilight colors or in storm light, and can be filled with sunlit birds, balloons or other lighter-than-air objects. I see hands and fingers coated, dripping sticky substances like syrup or crude oil; the more these photographers create lascivious atmospheres with their lighting and composition, the more popular their pictures become. Grabbing hands, fondling hands, hands and fingers clothed in every kind of bandage from gauze and adhesive tape to stretchy ace wrappings, each creates its own inflationary pocket-universe. We should not overlook hands embellished with henna — they form an exotic and venerable sub-genre all their own.

I prefer images expressing states of mind and body happening genuinely in the ordinary flow of consciousness, rather than contrived photographs without much content or meaning. Pictures showing humans creating something, fixing something with their hands, achieving something, contain more power. Moreover, one sees people in public unconsciously choreographing hand gestures in the moment, perhaps trying to communicate nuanced feelings eccentric to themselves, for which we have no linguistic equivalents. These psychological movements evaporate suddenly, therefore challenge the photographer to react within a narrow slice of time, where no space for contrivance exists.