mind the nap (photography)

I’ve asked to myself about how to use photography in order to represent someone’s identity. Is photography meant to be objective? And does objectivity really exist, especially when we talk about people? People perform their identities; they perform a temporary state of being. Looking for my ideal representation of someone it became clear to me that to get closer to an utopic objective portrait I should try to go behind all the different masks, behaviors and expressions that people perform.

This project is a photographic work which consists of a series of portraits made while the subject is sleeping. The idea is that when we sleep we don’t show our feelings (unless we are dreaming intensively) and we cannot perform our masks. So my investigation is about what remains. The face of the sleeper is the face of a child, is the starting point from which all the expressions get born. The subject is unaware, it has no control and the only thing the photographer can do, is to record, with nobody’s interpretation.

I didn’t want to take portraits of people who I knew well because I didn’t want to transmit the idea that I had of them, so I first put a post on two websites, where I explained the idea of the project, asked people to come in my place to sleep for one night and told them that I would have rewarded them cooking dinner and breakfast. I didn’t put any kind of restriction, I didn’t ask for pictures or any particular age, profession, class, gender because I was only interested in people as human beings. I got to know some of them only when they arrived at my place.

Lightjet print, 60x40 cm