ENCOUNTERS
What fascinate me about an encounter with another person in photography is the inner action that, to see it, it demands of me to slow down and pay attention. This is a gateway into a different kind of connection and conversation, one that is driven by, I dare say, a primal connection among us: an encounter with an intangible force of a human presence.
In the moment of an encounter with another human, the richness of their inner world is not of a photographer’s command; at that instance I am merely a witness to part of their world unfolding before me and the process of capturing it is but a meeting point where the subject is as much an author as a person behind a camera.
It is antithetical to news circle's penchant for the sensational and the spectacular, thanks to which the imagery of crime, famine, hunger, and ravages of war has been wielded into a defining stereotypes of a people or a geographical area. Not that these does not exist-they do exist and have existed in all people throughout the ages in all corners of the world-rather its a shortsighted pretense of insight that treats these as a defining character of a place or a group of people that has served as an arsenal from which fear mongering, xenophobia, racism, has wielded their potency to divide.
This project focus on a simple moment of an audience meeting a captured subject. It's an invitation to slow down and get to find something of yourself in the image, because upon closer look a portrait contains a familiarity we are versed to recognize, a primal link probably on the same spectrum as encountering a fellow human being in a lonely journey, something primal that speaks of warmth of home in the most recognizable of entities: a human face. This is where my fascination with portrait is born.
