Sometimes an artwork is created long before it can be fully understood. Not because it is unclear, but because the conditions needed to read it properly do not yet exist.
I began working on a series of long-exposure portraits around 2018, drawn by a quiet discomfort with speed, certainty, and the way photography insists on fixing identity into a single moment. I was interested in slowness, in duration, and in what happens to a person when the photographer stops demanding a pose, an expression, or a decisive instant. This kind of photography is not based on agreement, compromise, or exchange, but on a direct and honest transfer — a quiet transmission of presence rather than a negotiated image. At the time, I could not fully explain why this way of working felt necessary.
Photography has long been defined by the moment — by the fraction of a second in which meaning is expected to crystallize. Yet identity rarely reveals itself that way. It does not arrive complete, nor does it remain stable long enough to be held still. When time is allowed to stretch, identity resists being fixed. It becomes layered, unstable, and in motion.
Philosophers have described this condition as duration: lived time that unfolds continuously, where past and present coexist rather than replace one another. Within an extended exposure, identity is no longer something that can be posed or controlled. Blur, in this context, is not a technical failure but a consequence of time — a visible trace of its passage through a body.
Working with a large-format wooden camera and paper negatives reinforced this understanding in a very literal way. Paper, like a page, carries weight. It absorbs light the way a pencil inscribes a life. Over time, what is recorded is not just a face, but a trace — an accumulation of identities that together begin to resemble character. The process is slow, material, and indifferent to performance. Often, I am not even behind the camera while the exposure takes place. There are no instructions, no corrections, no attempt to guide the subject toward an image of themselves. What remains is a reduced relationship:
subject — time — light — machine.
In this setting, the familiar photographic mask does not fall. It persists. Over the course of fifteen minutes, expressions overlap and dissolve, not revealing a hidden truth, but exposing identity as something composite and unresolved. What appears is not a psychological portrait, but a spectrum — an accumulation of small shifts that resist certainty.
At the same time, this way of working quietly opposes the dominant visual logic of speed, clarity, and productivity. The subject is not asked to perform, to present a consumable version of themselves, or to produce an efficient image. Identity is not treated as a product. The long exposure interrupts this economy, allowing uncertainty to remain intact.
Years later, when the social and political structures around us began to fracture, the meaning of this work stood in full clarity. The system that once seemed stable revealed its own instability, and with it, the fluid nature of individual identity became impossible to ignore. What I had been exploring intuitively on a personal level suddenly resonated within a broader collective context.
Only then did I understand what these photographs had been holding all along. The individual had already begun to change before the system shifted. The system simply made that change visible.
Photography is often said to freeze reality. This work attempts the opposite. It refuses to fix identity in place, allowing it to remain unstable — not as a flaw, but as a condition of living. Even when we strive for stability, we exist within uncertainty and change. Identity does not only shift; it may need to. Perhaps it is even inscribed that way.
Looking back, this is less a series of portraits than an investigation into what identity becomes when given time. It suggests that sometimes a transformation must occur at the level of the system for an intuitive gesture to receive meaning or confirmation.
And sometimes, photography understands that transformation long before we do.