Dis-connections

Trying to arrange my photographs to evoke my experience of travelling to places very far away from each other, I found myself confronted with an inevitable fact: images would elicit very different sets of emotions or bring up different meanings according to the other photographs that accompanied them. What drew my attention when making such associations among my pictures were the visual links that emerged between pairs of photographs. These bonds normally connected a place or a detail to a person. These connections allowed me to link images that were apparently unrelated while evoking what I felt could best express the displacement and attempt at reconnection I experience while travelling. Elements very far away from each other were finally associated in each pair of photographs and in doing so they resulted in a very authentic rendition of my experience of travelling to and trying to understand disparate places very distant from each other. These links are neither narrative nor logical: I decided to make associations that were purely visual but that could evoke a link on a deeper, almost unconscious level. By pairing two images unrelated by context, the meaning of the single photo is put into question and new associations, new meanings are allowed to emerge. It is a play, a game of association and meaning that follows a visual lead and is ever so elusive, but also inevitable if, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, "because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning".