Characters. A series of street portraits.

“Characters” is a series of images that takes on the challenge of representing the unicity of individuals as it vanishes and it becomes a collective symbol in the space they inhabit. In the street, individuals become “types” and their faces become “masks”. Their secret unicity dwindles and they turn into “the waiter”, “the monk”, “the grandmother”, and so on. As I watch at them, and as you watch at them now, my (non) sitters become “characters” in the theatre of our unconscious. If the essence of portrait is to grasp the psychological deep waters of the sitters, my images miss the point. But can we really grasp the other’s face? My characters’s reality is that of actors in a movie, their “meaning” is the one we give them, and the deep waters we grasp are within ourself. The single photographs composing the series come from different projects and they are evidence of my persistent preoccupation with “portraits”. They have also been chosen for their pictorial interrelations, and they are better appreciated as a 3 x 3 grid with pictures 1 to 9 arranged from left to right and from top to bottom. This way, a series of triptychs will become evident.