From Painting to Photography

A change of method, not a change of question

My transition from painting to photography was not a rejection of one medium in favour of another. It was a change in where I believed the questions had to be asked.

Painting began during a period in which ideas of stability, control and personal responsibility had lost their certainty. The first works emerged from the need to give material form to experiences that could not yet be clearly named: pressure, fragility, confinement, hope and the uncertain effort of continuing.

In Resilience and Freedom, these experiences remained closely connected to the individual. Figures, wings, fractured surfaces and open spaces became carriers of an inner movement—the attempt to recover a capacity for action without denying vulnerability.

As the work developed, the questions began to move outward.

Fragile Balance brought personal experience into contact with wider social and political tensions. Protection could no longer be separated easily from control, freedom from responsibility, or individual desire from collective consequence. The paintings became less concerned with recovery itself than with the unstable conditions under which people attempt to live together.

Yet painting still required me to construct the world in which these tensions appeared.

I chose the figures, the materials and the symbolic relationships. I created ruins, barriers, openings and spaces of possible escape. The work could hold contradictory forces together, but the reality in which those contradictions had arisen remained at a distance.

Conversations surrounding my first solo exhibition made this limitation clearer to me. Whenever the discussion moved from painted symbols toward photographs, actual places or concrete situations, something changed. Questions of power, access, responsibility and social order became less abstract. They could be connected to spaces people entered, routines they followed and conditions they experienced together.

I began to understand that my questions required a world that did not originate entirely from me.

Photography introduced that resistance.

The street exists before I arrive. A barrier already serves a purpose. A timetable regulates movement independently of whether I photograph it. Buildings, infrastructures, signs and traces of use carry histories and decisions that cannot be reduced to my intention.

I still select. I decide where to stand, what enters the frame and which image remains. But I work with a reality that exceeds the order I bring to it. The photograph is shaped by my position while remaining bound to what was actually there.

This changed the relationship between the work and the world.

In painting, I constructed spaces in which inner and collective tensions could take form. In photography, I encounter spaces that have already been constructed, regulated and used. The question is no longer only what I can express through an image, but what becomes visible when the existing world is interrupted by framing, distance, repetition and sequence.

The personal experience from which the work began did not disappear. It changed its function.

It remains a point of departure, but it is no longer the principal subject. What once appeared to be an individual failure of control became a reason to look more closely at the structures, expectations and shared arrangements within which personal experience takes shape.

This is why the city became important to my photography. Not as architecture alone and not merely as a setting for human life, but as a place where decisions become environment. Roads, thresholds, systems of supply, forms of labour and rules of access are made by people, yet later confront the individual as existing reality.

Photography allows me to remain within this contradiction: the world is already there, but the image is not. What appears in front of the camera precedes me; the relationships created through the work do not.

Writing later became a third way of continuing these questions. It follows the conditions surrounding images: how seeing is learned, how interpretation is prepared and how works are selected, framed and carried forward.

Painting, photography and writing therefore belong to the same development. They do not illustrate one another, and one has not simply replaced the other.

Painting constructs a space.

Photography encounters a world already constructed.

Writing follows the conditions under which both become meaningful.

The method changed because the question had moved beyond the inner image.

It had entered the shared world.