Final Project – Being, Seeing

Artist Statement

Being, Seeing is a photographic series that places a person in solitude to explore the relationship between the state of naturalness derived from being alone and how one would react to seeing reflections of themselves. It is a documentation of both male and female subjects to study their candid responses while being confronted with multiple mirrors displaying reflections of themselves.

Subjects were given about a minute alone in a confined space where no one else was around or watching them and were allowed to move in the area. They were placed in front of the camera, but the photographs of them were taken while they were initially unaware that the camera was shooting.

In addition to photographing the moment people were being very real, this project also involves the issue of body image, through the fact that the subjects were compelled to look at themselves.

Mirrors are typically associated with vanity and self-analysis. Humans habitually check their appearances in reflective surfaces as we have a basic impulse to know what we look like. Perhaps the significance of the mirror has also changed along the way, morphing with society’s constantly fluctuating beauty standards. The pressure to look a certain way physically becomes palpable when one reaches the age of understanding societal expectations and popularised trends, and this may affect some people more than others.

Being, Seeing sought to capture the rawness of its subjects in their entirety, to photograph them while they were behaving as they would when isolated from everyone else, without a façade on, as well as when they were faced with the element of truly looking at themselves.



 FINAL presentation

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