Echo Chamber
Category
Self Portrait
Location
London
Gear
Mamiya RB67
Description
This project uses iterative self-portraiture to examine the visual and psychological implications of power, objectification, viewership and fragmentation within photographic practice. Originally rooted in a personal confrontation with post-production anxiety, the work grew to interrogate broader structures of perception, particularly as they pertain to feminine and queer subjectivities. This project is structured around repetition, restaging the same shoot in a total of 6 iterations, and 10 shoots, taking place over the period of 4 months. After each session, eight darkroom prints are selected and hung on the walls of the set: my own bathroom. As the images accumulate and climb upward from bathtub edge to ceiling, the space becomes a dense archive of photographic labor and psychological strain. This process mimics a recursive thought pattern with the subject receding further into her own representation, an echo of herself. Eventually, the familiarity turns into distortion, creating an aesthetic claustrophobia that can only be escaped partly: the body of the subject has vanished, yet a mirror, hung among the final row of prints, offers only a glimpse of her reflection. While autobiographical in form, the work speaks to a shared experience: the feeling of being both seen and unseen, scrutinized yet misread, aestheticized yet forgotten. Photography is therefore a particularly precise case study, magnifying the mechanisms of control, surveillance and detachment that define visual culture at large. Here, the camera is not neutral, it is, instead, both a site of erasure through accumulation, and a record of punishing self-indulgence. This work doesn’t seek resolution. Instead, it documents a spiraling erosion of selfhood that denies us authorship over our own identities. And yet, somewhere within that ritualistic repetition, a new kind of authorship emerges: one not from control, but from surrender. In that final reflection, perhaps, is not the self as it was, but the self as it is becoming.
Photographer
Karin Sarkizova
Social Media
Instagram: karinscaries
Website: https://www.karinsaark.com
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