I covered every surface of my studio apartment with silver Mylar, creating an environment where every surface was distorted by reflections. For 70 days, I lived in this space, surrounded by fractured images of my body, and slowly felt my sense of self dissolve. I invited strangers into my apartment and asked them to recreate the pose I had just seen them doing outside. No names or personal details were exchanged; they entered as anonymous bodies. I then hid in my bathroom, set the camera timer to take a photograph of them without my presence in the room. When the timer rang through the room, the camera witnessed the manipulation of the stranger’s pose and background on the Mylar. It reminded me of how I felt working as a photojournalist when my camera was controlled by its owner, who used it to erase the identities of those I was photographing in pursuit of a news story. It was mechanically repeating the same dehumanizing act it had once performed. Ironically, what the camera created was a beautiful and hopeful vision — the possibility of seeing a person free from any background or condition.
Making Process