West Side Wall Detail

6x bw print on Ultra Premium Presentation Matte Archival Inkjet Paper

17×22 inches

This work sprang from an unfinished interaction with an old lady where the recognition of gaze stayed faltered. Within this unfinished knowledge,

The Visitors as project got started. Searching for meaning in a new land in the mid of political turmoil the project becomes an interaction with the known and unknown faculty of ego. The relationship of experience and its association to language faculty within the discipline of still and motion picture photography’s fragmented still moments became a key tool for this photographic realization.

The photographs give a new experience of the world which is otherwise absent in reality. But to photograph one needs a pre-occupational understanding or knowledge of the subject itself. One is a known collective language of the world and the other is a subjective linguistic interpretation of an imagination. This dialectic of these two experiences has been the core subject matter of work.

Riju has been thinking about the epistemology of photographs and how a flat plane can generate a new meaning in our cognitive faculty and stage an imaginary reality, a different phenomenon from the pre-occupational knowledge of the world.

The western canon of portraiture prioritizes the clarity of the subject of interest: the face and eyes, where the viewer projects their knowledge. This discourses the language faculty of Identity. To critically engage this trope, glass windows in conversation with the face, a stimulus to the exterior, and its gaze, associated with the vantage point of the viewer, became an important subject matter in this work within the time frame of Spring through the beginning of Fall 2025. The project extensively applied straight photography through in camera cross-fading technique with the vantage point and the glass window. This particularity does not let in few of the photographs to prioritize the subject rather every layer in a photograph becomes important. Through this Riju critically raises an argument on the photographic objectivity and its single handed construction of the understanding of identity especially to structure an idea of Oriental. (1)

Glass windows represent an absolute agent of sublime voyeurism which creates a safe distance and threshold between these two selves. In post structural psychoanalysis, reflection alters its association to the self in the time and space realm (2). Vilém Flusser notes that since the camera is coded, the self in a photograph is always decontextualized to create a diorama which has never existed before, creating a new imaginary reality (3). This is how the windows in these images function by removing oneself from the exterior and vice versa.

Drawing ideas from photographic philology of John Tagg’s Disciplinary Frame (4) where his theoretical framework starts and departs from Sebald’s novel on emigration along with Zizek’s theory on screen (5) in the realm of seeing or gazing this work explores on Riju’s subjective reality on his past experience, memories and desire surrounding the concept “home”.

He has borrowed the idea of “stage” from both cinema (6) and dialectical teleology in Marxist Hegelian views (7). For the category of cinema an actor plays a character “truthful” and “closed” within itself recorded by the camera’s “objective” gaze but for a non-dialectical teleology the gaze always seek for a future absolutism from the knowledge of the past. Due to irregular growth in this visual economy the process of repetition becomes absolute rather than the otherwise.

In return it emphasizes the difference between cinema and photography with the presence and absence of the subject’s “gaze” obscuring the relationship between document and stage.

List of References:

1. Allan, Michael. Picturing Other Languages: Reflections on Photography and Philology. College English. 2019 (pp.108-112) https://www.academia.edu/41616915/Picturing_Other_Languages_Reflections_on_Photography_and_Philology

2. Scott, Maria. Deciphering the Gaze in Lacan’s ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’. DS Project

3. Flusser, Villem. Towards The Philosophy of Photography. Published by Reaktion Books Ltd. 2000. pp 14-21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWcX3XQyukg

4. Tagg, John. Disciplinary Frame. University of Minnesota. 2009. (introduction)

5. Zizek, Slavoy. The Lacanian Real: Television. The Symptom 9. (edited by J.A.) (The second TV-lesson: you only die twice)Colloquium “Jacques Lacan: Television,” New York, April 10, 1987

6. Campany, David. Photography and Cinema Reaktion Books pub. 2008. pp 94-100 Alternate Source for listening https://righteyedominant.buzzsprout.com/1841611/episodes/15963931-photography-and-cinema-an-interview-with-david-campany with Nick Tauro Jr.

7. [Ref. 14. Menozzi, Filippo. Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukács and the Question of Teleology. International Critical Thought. Volume 12, 2022. Issue. 1. Taylor & Francis Online. Pub. March 9, 2022.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2022.2035792

   Note 9: This excerpt is taken from Filippo Menozzi’s Literature Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukacs and the question of Teleology published by Taylor & Francis on March 9, 2022 under the category of International Critical Thought. Volume 12, 2022. Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2022.2035792:

   Teleology is hence the core of collective action, not merely individual enterprise, as Thompson continues:

   Lukács is therefore saying that for us to act together, we possess a shared form of teleological positing.  …  The critical potency of this social ontology now begins to be glimpsed. Once we place the ends or purposes of our activities at center stage, we begin to open up the way that social values can be assessed as either promoting social ends or private ends. (Thompson Citation2019, 431) Thompson, M. J. 2019. “Marx, Lukács and the Groundwork of Critical Social Ontology.” In Georg Lukács and the Possibility of Critical Social Ontology, edited by M. J. Thompson, 419–455. Leiden: Brill

The Visitors (September 30-October 11, 2025) Laverne Kraus Gallery, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. US

An Excerpt from the 8 fold artist book (Feb, 2026)