traces

 

I spent many years in front of the camera as a model. Through the experience of being shaped by the gaze of others, I came to understand that a person always emerges through a relationship with someone else.
 

When I eventually moved behind the camera, Susan Sontag’s words, “Photography is an act of appropriating the thing photographed,” struck me with new weight. To point a camera at someone ultimately means that only an image filtered through my own gaze can be captured. That is not inherently wrong, yet I began to feel a desire to face people with a more honest and less predetermined filter.
 

For this, I believe it is essential to remain open, in a state of not knowing, without assuming that I already understand. Living abroad, I have constantly been seen through many kinds of frameworks such as race, gender, body, culture, and religion. These experiences taught me the importance of leaving the unknown untouched and of listening quietly to the world of the other.
 

In this new work, I have photographed very few people. The faint traces and subtle presences that remain in a space can, at times, speak of a person more profoundly than their visible figure ever could. Past time and time yet to come, life and death, presence and absence all come together here. I am observing the moments in which the world breathes between these boundaries.
 

A photograph is not only something I look at. It is something that looks back at me, a trace left by a reciprocal gaze. Without imposing intention, I simply receive what quietly arises there.