Recognition

These portraits replace humans by shop mannequins to question our empathy and our social standards. We can recognize human attitudes in these plastic figures, as empathy lets us identify with them. Ourselves, we chase and purchase outfits for our own idealised attitudes, to construct our personality and seek each other’s recognition. The unreal yet unprocessed portraits investigate the make-up of human character, and echo staged or post-processed portraits idealising real humans. The street photographs, collected across the European continent, confront the uniformity of social standards. They underline our poetic instincts, our identity enhanced beyond our natural body, but also restrained by conformity and marketed stereotypes. - Photographs from Barcelona, Milan, Pamplona, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Stockholm, Istanbul.