'circled invisibility'

Driven by a strong interest in visualization of the “unseen” through abstraction and manipulation I wanted to re-evaluate the pre-existing modes of portrait making and representation. Depicting a face, capturing only the surface of a person, always suggests something is missing and unknown below the surface. A photographic portrait is therefore never complete. In conclusion my research and experimentation suggests that it is impossible to capture the “unseen”, the unconscious essence of a depicted person through a photographic portrait. However, by manually obscuring, hiding and abstracting parts of the portrait photographs I give the viewer space to project himself into the image in order to expose his own unconscious and to think critically about what he sees. The purely representational purpose of the portrait is stripped away and the viewer is forced to examine the unseen, deeper elements of the target. Through the process of abstraction and hiding (i.e. ‘double negation’) I want to illustrate that a photographic portrait consists not only of the visible, superficial parts of the sitter but also contains an unseen element. This unseen element is exposed, ironically, through the hiding and abstraction process.