Untitled (Figure with Camera)
Medium: Alcohol Marker and Chalk Pencil
Date: 2023
Project/Body of Work: Ongoing Private Illustrated Manuscript Project
A figure stands beside an antique large-format camera mounted on a tripod, holding aloft a flash lamp at the moment of ignition. The burst of light is violent and consuming, bleaching detail from the space around it. The figure himself remains still, gazing outward with a kind of settled presence, not reacting to the flash, but illuminated by it.
The camera is an object that captures, that fixes images, while momentarily the flash obliterates them. In that paradox the tool of observation both reveals and obscures.
Process Notes:
This image centers on the paradox of the self seen from outside itself — consciousness collapsing inward, the temporal complexity of encountering a version of yourself rendered strange by distance and time passed. The figure in this manuscript appears across different ages and moments, but here exists in adolescence, the beginning of awareness that ones self is being witnessed, and in doing so becoming something sometimes unrecognizable to ones self.
While walking through these ideas, Duane Michals’ photograph The Illuminated Man (1968) surfaced internally as a parallel. Another artist thinking through the same territory: how illumination can simultaneously reveal and erase.
The camera becomes both mirror and instrument. Photography thinks in light, time, and presence, the same currencies this illustrative illumination trades in. The flash illuminates the inner landscape while obscuring it, which felt like the truest rendering of that paradox: the self clarified and erased in the same moment.
The figure's calm isn't necessarily resistance, but the presence of someone witnessing, already aware that the image cannot stay, that the stranger in the mirror will not be recognizable tomorrow.
