On Pain

Since I come originally from the world of translation and theater, I find myself as a photographer obsessed with visually translating abstract concepts. And while there are a million ways to communicate concepts like time or pain, I find myself going back to long exposure. Since I started teaching myself about different photographic techniques, I found myself drawn to long exposures. Allowing the camera to register all the light and movement for whatever time the shutter is open for, is fascinating to me. It’s like making a video, telling a moving story in one exposure. In this case it was pain. For the past one and a half years I have been living with pain, that got worse every day. I was really interested in finding a way I can give an onlooker an idea about what pain might look like. Between the repeated body pattern and the abstract exposures, the mathematical patterns that make sense and the chaos, where you can barely see anything is a line, a very fine one that separates tension from breakdown. The sequence of the exposures uses the more abstract images to create a breather, a sort of bridge between the intense repetitions. In a way this is an artistic x-ray, that exposes something beyond what we see with our eyes. Using the camera not only to record but also to create an exposure and hopefully create an experience that is visually pleasing and to which people can relate to.