Hidden
Exploring the depths of a city, person, situation, place, feeling (anger, love, happiness, despair, pain...) might happen to be,
for a photographer, a courageous introspection.
A voice that s/he has been longing for,
A music that s/he has never heard of,
A pain that s/he has never shared or could share,
A person whom s/he could never hug, into whose eyes s/he could never look,
A past, a history that s/he never knows of,
A situation that s/he has not protested against yet, personally or socially,
or the feelings, perhaps her/his own, that s/he has always wanted to violate...
We need to feel uneasy in order to meet.
Being able to do that with and through photography can be a fortunate opportunity, or perhaps a magical obscure tool, to cut holes in our shells, and in the spectator’s encapsulating world too, and finally to breathe.
What is crucial is to leave the comfort zone,
To feel the unease, to make the other person feel it too, and to welcome the uneasiness with and through photography,
To be able to trigger different and new feelings and questions,
or let the uneasiness transform itself, both for us and for the spectator, into different and new feelings and emotions.
Instead of photographing neutral and aimless frames of nature or desperate faces, to look at life, at our selves, at things without being tempted by beauty, but rather seeing them through the of the images, lives, and feelings hanging in purgatory, through the HIDDEN...
To look at nature in its uncanny instances perhaps...
To touch upon the areas in our lives or the lives of the others that we cannot either dare to go into or simply ignore, and maybe eventually try to break our shells (thus to expand?)
To trace our uneasy feelings with this purpose,
In order to be able to touch upon ourselves,
it is because we need more to face the questions we cannot answer rather than the answers we already live comfortably with...
To remain in the uneasiness and the distress; in the emptiness and the void.
Only then we can be vulnerable and only in that way we can get close to ourselves and to life.
Only when we can lift off our thick walls of justifying defense...
Can the indescribability of the times, feelings, places, situations, processes in which we feel hopeless, restless, lonely and weak, or in which we have nothing to make sense of it all, offer us the chance to break our armors?
Laleper Aytek
2015