“I live for these moments, when I stop to look and I stay to see”.

 

This sentence accompanies me in the last few years. I didn't manage to trace its source nor author, but I keep it close to heart as a practicing artist and curator engaging with photography.

 

Once a moment is recorded the possibility of re-looking, of staying-to-see, has been open to all. My records are usually of places and spaces, most of which I have found myself in during my search for meaning. They are the visual traces of my half conscious narrative building up as my journey unfolds. I collect these seeing-moments into intuitive sequences, thematic-like journals. 

 

Photography is a constant search for the right distance from an object, a subject or an event. The photographer-witness is in constant flux in time and space. I'm preoccupied with places marked with a cryptic presence, whether it be an unmade hotel room or an empty pedestal awaiting Venus. As I stay to see, I explore the mechanisms which trigger the projection of a human presence into a frame empty of subjects. Alternatively, I'm curious with the ways photography helps preserve the present. As in my on-going investigation of temporary rooms that are constructed and deconstructed on a daily basis.

 

It is as if I'm asking “what-wasn't-there”? To contest  Roland Barthes' famous epistemological riddle. What is it about photography that allows us to experience presence and absence in one singular stroke? And then see again. And then what?