#26: The Invisible
I think collaborations have always been very important to me. And I think in fashion photography, that's one of the greatest things that attracts me in fashion photography is that you work in teams and you collaborate with many different people. I often think that my art is more of solitary, more introvert side of my personality, while the fashion is more of the extrovert and is much more about the energy, the swiftness of a photo shoot collaborating with other people.
And this series I did also a long time ago, like in the early 2000s, 2001, with one of my friends, my good friend, Emilia De Moi, who is an artist, but at the time also studied fashion. This is where we set out to photograph her work. So here, we went into the house where she lives at the time. It was an old kind of deserted building and she was living there just to preserve it for the time being. And we were inspired by the weird elements in this place. We started to create all these weird shapes, and often you don't see the faces in my work. Here, that's very clear that you don't see faces. And I think when the moment that you see a face in a picture, it's quite easy to read the picture, because we are so used to look at people's faces and read their expressions, see how they feel, et cetera.
And somehow, in the process of editing my pictures, I felt that I was often drawn more and more towards the pictures where you wouldn't see the face. And I think that's because they seem more mysterious to me. I can't really grasp it. I can't really feel who is this, why is this? And by expressing something with the body, the motion of the body, the gestures, or the way that you use clothes, you can still express a kind of feeling and the kind of emotion actually without even seeing a face. This way, it becomes more universal. It's not about that particular person in that particular moment, but it becomes much more universal. So as a viewer, it's also easier to somehow connect, at least that's how I feel. So it makes you pay more attention to the invisible things.