statement

Today we live in a world offers us the possibility to
be in different places at the same time. Internet surfing, online chatting, reality TV, or simply calling people from all-over, throughout the world, is ordinary.
This phenomenon motivated me to develop this project. Which of these realities (virtual or real) is our true one; what does it mean to feel more comfortable in a virtual reality than in our “real world”?

For the sessions, I asked my models to close their eyes and to imagine their ideal place, where, if it would be possible at this moment, they would like to be. After that, I questioned them about the place they imagined and asked them to describe it to me. With the search engine “google images” I tried to find pictures of places matching the descriptions my models. I downloaded theses images on my computer and created the backgrounds for the portraits.
The fact my models have their eyes closed helps me
to direct the viewer ‘s attention to the entire image (person and background) normally trying to make
eye contact.

This is a portraiture series reflecting a contemporary society, in which people prefer to close their eyes than to look at their environments. Who are we, if we (don’t) look around?

These portraitures are printed in life-size. I shot these portraitures with a 6x6 Hasselblad camera. After, I scanned the images and combines them with pictures
I found on the internet. The final result is a series of 10 digital manipulated images. Using a Hasseblad camera offered me the possibility to get excellent quality images with many details in it. The jpg backgrounds, which I downloaded from the internet, are mostly very small with a low definition. Blending these two different types of photographs made the pictorial end result interesting. From a certain distance they seem to be quite classical images. Close examination, however, reveals that the texture of the background and the texture of the portraitures are not the same.