From 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 much of 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, materials and 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 towards 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, when to wait 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.

The personal experience from which the work began did not disappear. It became a point of departure rather than the principal subject.

What had first appeared as 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.

I had learned early that possibilities do not simply present themselves. They depend on access, language, initiative, material circumstances and the ability to navigate institutions. This did not become the subject of the work in a directly biographical sense, but it shaped the questions I began to ask.

The city became important because those questions could be encountered there in material form.

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 allowed me to remain within this contradiction: the world is already there, but the image is not.

What appears before the camera precedes me. The relationships created through framing and sequence do not. The photograph remains bound to an existing world while making another order within it visible.

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

It had entered the shared world.