Portrait photography. Ongoing.
The human face is, for me, the story itself — in painting, in writing, in film, in photography. Not a surface to be depicted but a text to be read.
The people in this series are of two kinds: those I know and love, and those I met in order to photograph them. But the distinction matters less than it might seem. In both cases I approached the face already carrying something — an expectation, an emotion, a meaning I had decided was there before I pressed the shutter. Like the macro photographs, these portraits are experiments in the observer's participation. I brought my own reality to each face, and the face gave it back to me transformed.
In this sense, every portrait in this series is also a self-portrait. The laughing face, the tired face, the face that wants to speak and the face that wants silence — these are my own states, reflected through faces that belong to other people. The subjects are magic mirrors: the viewer sees someone else; what is actually there is me.
I have been trying to read faces for as long as I have been making work. Portraits is where that effort began in photography. The questions it opens — what a face reveals, what it conceals, how much of a person survives in an image, and how much of the photographer survives instead — are questions I am still working through. They will reach their most sustained form in Biyometrik, a body of work in progress that approaches the face as data, as identity document, as the site where the state decides who a person is.
Portraits is the beginning of that inquiry. It is also, looked at closely, an autobiography.
