A Game of Photos

Self-published, 2022

The works in this book were created between 2014 and 2021. The photographs used come both from the artist’s own archive and from collected images — roughly half drawn from each source.

The project began with the realization that many photographs taken over more than a decade felt useless: they remained without value, yet seemed too wasteful to discard. Instead, the artist chose to destroy them. The first image — a naked back — was torn apart, the rupture breaking its static composition and unexpectedly giving it new life. From that moment, the process expanded: scratching, rubbing, cutting. Like a surgeon, the artist operated on the images.

When personal archives were exhausted, new material was collected. Negatives were developed in the darkroom, prints pinned to the wall and studied repeatedly to uncover hidden structures and latent spaces. These were then further transformed through collage, burning, or combined with objects into photographic installations. Gradually, a method emerged. Only a tiny fraction of images — perhaps one in ten thousand — could be developed into a final work. Some transformations were immediate; others took years. The process required patience, time and chance.

More recently, large-scale installations were created using these altered photographs, though they are not included in the book due to format constraints. As the works accumulated, a historical thread appeared, and the book is organized chronologically.

This approach deliberately alters the “correctness” of a photograph by distorting the original author’s intent. It blurs the boundary between sensory and cognitive experience, extending the meaning of images. By questioning the relationship between photographs and their viewers, the work produces dissonant images that disrupt continuity and expose the unstable, constructed nature of the histories they once seemed to represent.