CURVES SERIES

Year: 2019–ongoing
Medium: Portrait photography through water (medium format)
Technique: Optical distortion, no digital manipulation

Exhibitions:
– Cooltajner – Koridor, Považská Bystrica (2024)
– A4 – Zine Launch, Bratislava (2025)
– OFF Bratislava (2024)

A portrait usually fixes a person into a single likeness. We assume that this likeness belongs to them.

I am interested in what produces that likeness and what forms emerge when representation is shaped by a physical process whose conditions I can set, but whose specific outcome I cannot fully control.

I begin with a studio portrait, print it, and photograph it again through a moving surface of water. The project therefore does not transform the body directly, but an already existing photographic image of a person. I alter the conditions under which this image is formed again: the movement of water, optical refraction, and exposure time.

At short exposures, a single sharp, anatomically impossible yet distinct likeness emerges. At longer exposures, multiple optical states of the same motionless portrait are recorded within one photograph. They do not merge into a uniform blur. They overlap, partially cancel one another out, and remain visible to different degrees. One part of the face remains legible, another disappears, while another loses its definite form.

CURVES began as a response to idealised and retouched representations of the body that present a particular form of human appearance as correct. Over time, it developed into a broader investigation of portraiture. Likeness is produced not only by a person’s appearance, but also by the way photography renders it and the way the viewer reads the image.

The resulting faces and bodies never existed in the forms in which we see them, yet they are not invented. They are produced entirely through a photographic process, without digital manipulation. CURVES therefore separates the photographic truth of the process from the anatomical fidelity of the resulting likeness. At the longest exposures, the identity of the specific person disappears before the human presence does. It is precisely this distinction that interests me.