Presence of myself has been undecipherable question For decades. My consciousness started with the sight; standing before a mirror, I see arms, legs, and skin, as parts making up the whole of my body. I recognize it is my senses that synthetically interpret these parts as clues not only of a whole, but of my presence, yet I ask myself if this is enough to ensure my existence. So I start being suspicious about all of the senses including eyesight.
I concentrate on the most familiar image one could recognize, oneself through one’s own eyes. As I concentrate on the image, on myself, I think of Freud, and his concept of the uncanny. I thought it refer a slight ‘difference’ between the image I see with my own eyes and whatever things really exist beyond the optic sense; things which I can’t actually define existence. So I think there is unrecognized fear about uncertain presence of oneself. In course of considering above idea I also thought about a role of photography in this issue as one of media that I’ve lived with more than decade. Photography can’t reveal this ‘difference’ but, in my works on the contrary, it can bind things that we think can’t stick together. In other words, It makes a symmetrical point of correspondence with the ‘uncanny.’
Traditional image making, darkroom printing, even modern image making, the digital darkroom, fail to create a physical ground where viewers can consider ontological entities. These forms of image making merely capture a visual space, an optic plane. I try to interact with that visual space by making secondary documentation through physical object manipulating in front of myself with camera. To accomplish this I insert the ridiculous, for example pink boards, life size photographs planted in the ground, and figures that resist gravity- into the frame. While this introduces an element of humor to the work it also generates an image in which the picture is more than what rests on the surface of the photograph.
In each trial, each project, I introduce optical, physical and social alterations that works to operate between myself (the photographer), and my subject; in doing so I begin to realize what I see before me and how recognition functions. As I step away through obvious absurdness of my working process and its photo-documentative product I know I am working towards the solutions I seek- how and why I exist.