DURING THE STORM
Photographs, 2020
These images were produced during a storm using a night-vision camera. Yet the storm functions only as the initial condition of a more complex event. What the series records is the transformation of perception when human vision is displaced by an optical regime foreign to it.
The camera produces another world.
Garden, domestic architecture, water, vegetation, and body are subjected to the same process of visual disintegration. Objects lose stability, distances become uncertain, and forms oscillate between appearance and disappearance. The image ceases to operate as a surface of recognition and becomes instead a field of intensities.
The violent reds, phosphorescent greens, spectral negatives, and electronic grain do not represent the night. They are the visible traces of a device confronting the limits of observation. Photography no longer describes the world; it records the operations required to construct it.
As the series unfolds, the distinction between exterior and interior begins to dissolve. The garden and the house are subjected to the same perceptual instability. Even the photographer’s own body is absorbed into the system of registration: fingers, wounds, fragments of skin, and involuntary movements emerge as evidence of a presence that no longer fully controls the image it produces.
The storm acts as an agent of disorganization—not only upon the landscape, but upon the act of seeing itself. Vision becomes uncertain, tactile, and bodily. Objects cease to exist as stable entities and instead appear as fluctuating concentrations of light within a continuously transforming environment.
These photographs occupy an ambiguous territory between document, physiological experience, and machinic perception. They do not depict what occurred during a stormy night. They reveal the emergence of a world that can only exist when darkness, atmosphere, body, and technology cease to function as separate systems.
What remains is the trace of that instability: an archive of vision at the precise moment it loses the ability to recognize what it sees.
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