Alight
Heidelberg, Germany
New York
2023
A gaze is not a light yet it seems nonetheless to project. Streetlamps alight the asphalt as I trigger my digital camera, and as I stare into their luminous eyes, my gaze and theirs merge into one inseparable loop of vision and projection, making unintelligible the observer and the observed, sealed in an amalgamation of 0s and 1s. As if I’m looking through a reflective window in a room alight, enclosed yet yearning for connections; and as night falls, a projected image of myself becomes visible on the window pane. Imprinting myself onto each exposure, inhabiting the photographed environment and possessing the photographed subject in a frenzy of voyeuristic indulgence, simultaneously detached and within.
Like a moth flying headlong into the flames, disoriented by the anomalies of light, I cannot resist that contradictory thrill of the camera’s gaze.