FLAWED: FINAL FASCINATION?
In a world GETTING numbed by perfected visuals,
is flawed imagery what will resonate with us the most?
Pliny the Elder tells us of the legendary contest between the ancient Greeks painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. While Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds tried to peck at them, Parrhasius fooled Zeuxis himself who asked to pull back the curtain covering his rival’s painting, only to discover that the curtain itself was the painting. Parrhasius had deceived not a bird, but a fellow master.
More than two thousand years later, technology has given us full and immediate control over the images we want to create. To conjure a perfect reflection of reality, we no longer need to master a craft; a prompt is enough. Everyone today has the capacity to be a Parrhasius. As pristine imagery starts to inundate our world, how will art continue to fascinate us?
Perhaps the answer lies in flawed imagery. Compared to AI-generated perfection, it offers the promise of something real. A fault is proof that an image was not prompted into being, but the fruit of a moment that actually existed in time. If art is to echo our lived experience, will imperfect yet undoubtedly real images become the most profound way to relfect our own humanity?
Every experimental photograph and movie presented here was born from a malfunction in the film that was used. In the accidental glitches and double exposures, I found something truer than any clean exposure could hold: an echo of our own shortcomings as human beings. Rather than magnify the perfect world surrounding us, let art reveal the hidden forces that shape our deepest nature.
Rome's ancient streets entangled with its neo-brutalist architecture; the Beirut port explosion laid over a screen researching the trauma; Galatea, finally alive, watching Hercules in the Greek heat; a painted branches of a family tree overlaid on the entrance of a mausoleum; These superimpositions are open to the viewer's own personal interpetation, the same way our unique past taints our present, or our lies hint at personal truths.
In a world getting numbed by perfected visuals, is flawed imagery what will resonate with us the most?
35mm print on Hahnemüle William turner 310gr paper