Portraits

For me, portraits are not simply records of human faces. They are also an exploration of the relationship between looking and memory.

A photograph fixes a moment, but it cannot fix the meaning of that moment. A face remains in the photograph with the same expression, in the same light, with the same gaze. Yet each time we return to it, we realise that we have changed as much as the image itself. What we know about a person, what we have forgotten, what we have experienced, and the relationship we have with them all change over time. A fixed image can therefore open onto a different story with every new act of looking.

This is why I am interested in the uncertainty of where a portrait's meaning actually resides. How much belongs to the person in the photograph, and how much is produced by the person looking at it? A face does not simply reveal itself. It activates memory, association, and imagination. An expression can evoke a past that is nowhere present in the photograph. A face we once thought we knew intimately can, years later, appear unexpectedly unfamiliar.

The portraits include both people who are part of my life and strangers I have photographed during brief encounters. The faces of those close to me are read through a shared history. When I look at them, I see not only the person but also traces of the time we have spent together. With strangers, another process begins. Knowing almost nothing about a person, I find myself constructing a character, a past, perhaps even an entire life from a face encountered for only a few seconds.

There is less difference between these two situations than we might imagine. Knowing someone for years does not mean having access to everything they are. Even the person closest to us remains, to some extent, unknowable. Conversely, the face of a complete stranger can be enough to make the mind construct a story.

One of the enduring tensions within the history of portraiture lies here. To represent a face is not necessarily to capture a person's identity, but to open a space between what is visible and what remains beyond it. Portraiture has long attempted to give a person a lasting presence through an image. Yet a single image can contain only a fragment of a life. Everything beyond that fragment is completed by the act of looking.

This is what continues to fascinate me about photography. It takes a moment from the past and preserves it on an unchanging surface. Yet every return to the image reconstructs that past in a slightly different way. The photograph remains still; memory does not.

Over time, my practice of photographing people also led me from the idea of the singular face towards the possibility of a more collective one. In Person A, rather than fixing the face of an individual, I began to think of faces as fragments of a single image that is continually altered by each new encounter. The portrait thus moves beyond representing one person and becomes a process shaped by successive acts of looking.

In this sense, Portraits is not a completed series. It is an ongoing field of work that continues to expand for as long as I continue to photograph people. Each encounter adds another face, another moment, another possibility to the growing archive. And when I return to photographs I made years ago, I often find that the meaning of the same image has changed.

The open-ended nature of the series comes from this. A portrait cannot really be finished, because the meaning of a face, like memory itself, remains in motion. A photograph may fix a moment, but it cannot determine what that moment will become.

Perhaps what photography ultimately fixes is not a person, but only a moment. The story of who that person is continues to be written, over time, by every eye that looks back.