Macro photography series. 2005. Istanbul.
How close can you get before the story changes?
The answer, it turns out, is: you cannot get close enough to change it. The story remains.
The answer, it turns out, is: you cannot get close enough to change it. The story remains.
Macromania is a series of macro photographs in which the subject has been rendered entirely abstract. No image in this series is identifiable at the scale it is presented. And yet viewers consistently name what they see — a face, a dog, water, skin, landscape. The naming happens automatically, before thought. The eye constructs a world from whatever it is given.
This is what interests me: not the objects themselves, but the moment of rationalisation — the instant at which a viewer imposes coherence onto something that has none. Macro photography creates a space where that mechanism becomes visible. Push past the threshold of recognisability and you open a new territory, one where everything is possible precisely because nothing is yet determined.
The parallel I keep returning to is from quantum theory: the observer's gaze does not record reality, it participates in producing it. Macromania is a set of experiments in that participation. Each image is a question addressed to whoever is looking.
