06 — Portrait / Presence

A portrait is never simply the representation of a face.

It begins with an encounter — a moment of attention between photographer and subject, shaped by distance, gesture, light, duration and the awareness of being observed.

Working with analogue photography, I am interested in what happens before and beyond the final portrait: successive exposures, changes of posture and expression, the negative as a record of time, and the transformation that takes place through the darkroom.

Some portraits reveal; others conceal. A face may confront the camera directly, disappear behind a mask, emerge through shadow, or become only partially accessible. Identity is never entirely fixed by the photographic image.

In self-portraiture, this relationship becomes more complex: photographer and subject occupy the same space, while masks, objects and other forms of representation can intervene between the self and its image.

Portrait / Presence explores portraiture not as a definition of who someone is, but as a space of encounter — between self and other, intimacy and distance, appearance and disappearance, identity and representation.

What remains is not simply a likeness, but the trace of a presence.