What These Photographs Are Not Washburn Gallery, University of Oregon
(2026)
This work engages a critical vantage on post structural anthropology and its association with Affect especially in the context of neo-liberal approach in the homogenized universal representation of the idea of “family”. By recognition through gaze a simultaneous teleology arises in the reduction of the labor through capital and its production through the flat surface of a photograph. Thus the mis-recognition of “self” becomes inevitable by the denial of the “totality” which makes/ reify a concept of family a central “investigative” approach in the heart of the “capital State”. Building on these theories, I’ve begun using mirrors as objects in my work to explore an alternative idea of “self” theorized by Lacan and also ideated into its dissolution by Magritte. The mirrors replace the functionality of the camera, staging a new view of the decentralized subject and complicating the idea of photographic objectivity. (Ref. 1)
I have borrowed the idea of the stage from photography’s association to a fixed being without any alteration in the indexical. This linear teleology emphasizes the non-dialectic approach of the purpose with a fixed being. Similarly, an actor plays a character “truthful” and “closed” within itself recorded by the camera’s “objective” gaze which conforms to the aesthetics of neo-liberalism. (Ref. 2)
The project critically engages with the relationship between cinema and photography and how the presence and absence of the subject’s “gaze” obscures the relationship between documentary and stage. (Ref. 3)
List of References:
Peretz, Henri. Facing One’s Own.FAMILY Photographers photograph their families. Phaidon Press Inc. Pub. 2005. ISBN 0 7148 4402 0 (pp 6-7)
Nambrol, Nasrullah. Philosophy, Photography and Film. Literary Theory and Criticism.
Blatt, Ari J. Thinking Photographyin Film, or The Suspended Cinema of Agnes Varda and Eustache. University of Pennsylvania Press. (pub) French Forum, 2011, Vol. 36, No. 2/3 (2011), pp. 181-200