Sebuku ?!

I look at you,

Staring can be a very dominant form. A power that makes the one who is being looked at very vulnerable. It is the gaze—the gaze and the idea that you are not alone. Historically, as a society, we are moving step by step into a society of control, where CCTVs, drones, and cameras are becoming a daily thing. It is like someone is looking at us all the time, like there is a presence of power that makes our behaviors controlled. Gaze is now almost everywhere in the form of a unified eye, making our daily reality a sort of a “keeping up with the Kardashians” show.

looking at me.

Most of the time, the photographer is like a hunter, looking from place to place to capture a movement, a gaze, a click. During that action, there is a power play between a dominant force and a non-dominant force. Like a game, a fight, or a theatrical play. The picture captures that. Like a “shot,” the moment of this interaction is captured, now frozen, printed on paper as a physical object that is and will be there.

You look at me,

As Roland Barths states in camera obscura, ‘I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.’ In that sense, the act of “shouting” can also be described as an act of death, and the gaze then becomes a source of a wounding force. This specific moment was and is the thing that fascinates me the most in photography because if it is reversed, it can unveil the cruelty that sometimes exists inside the photographing medium.

looking at you

To unveil this idea of the “gaze,” I searched in my collection of Instax and analog photographs. I zoomed in on certain details of the photographed object (if it was a human being, I zoomed mostly on the expression of the photographed person (either in its face or a part of its body)), and I cropped them. I put them between paintings that captured a very decisive historical/mythological moment (as painting was the photographic medium before). In that way, the gaze becomes something Suspended (it is reversed but at the same time still dominant), and the reader becomes part of a death play, where there is no line between the hunter, the spectator, and the one who is being captured. Now we look, but we are also being looked at.

I look at you,

Staring can be a very dominant form. A power that makes the one who is being looked at very vulnerable. It is the gaze—the gaze and the idea that you are not alone. Historically, as a society, we are moving step by step into a society of control, where CCTVs, drones, and cameras are becoming a daily thing. It is like someone is looking at us all the time, like there is a presence of power that makes our behaviors controlled. Gaze is now almost everywhere in the form of a unified eye, making our daily reality a sort of a “keeping up with the Kardashians” show.

looking at me.

Most of the time, the photographer is like a hunter, looking from place to place to capture a movement, a gaze, a click. During that action, there is a power play between a dominant force and a non-dominant force. Like a game, a fight, or a theatrical play. The picture captures that. Like a “shot,” the moment of this interaction is captured, now frozen, printed on paper as a physical object that is and will be there.

You look at me,

As Roland Barths states in camera obscura, ‘I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.’ In that sense, the act of “shouting” can also be described as an act of death, and the gaze then becomes a source of a wounding force. This specific moment was and is the thing that fascinates me the most in photography because if it is reversed, it can unveil the cruelty that sometimes exists inside the photographing medium.

looking at you

To unveil this idea of the “gaze,” I searched in my collection of Instax and analog photographs. I zoomed in on certain details of the photographed object (if it was a human being, I zoomed mostly on the expression of the photographed person (either in its face or a part of its body)), and I cropped them. I put them between paintings that captured a very decisive historical/mythological moment (as painting was the photographic medium before). In that way, the gaze becomes something Suspended (it is reversed but at the same time still dominant), and the reader becomes part of a death play, where there is no line between the hunter, the spectator, and the one who is being captured. Now we look, but we are also being looked at.

Using Format