XY

No two people are the same, making them fascinating to study. Through my photographs I hope to capture what I perceive as striking, beautiful, and different from the ‘normal’, the generic, with reference to the ideas of personal aesthetic, ethnicity, and the portrait. XY explores identity and the photographic portrait, the idea that a portrait can be interpreted at a superficial level and deeper level. XY references our chromosomes and the DNA that we are composed of which is uniquely ours, much like our identity. No two people are alike. “What if everything you see is more than what you see”. The images that I create seek to do just this. Each image is composed of several different elements, overlays of textures, colours and other images that I have taken to create the final aesthetic. Visual aesthetic is very important to me, as is the freedom to experiment. XY has come to also explore such themes as personal depression, our darker sides and how we choose to present ourselves to the world, to create different perspectives of ourselves. The sense of psychical emotions and their effects, which cannot be seen, feeds into my visual work and I hope certain elements of this fascination can be seen within each portrait. “The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” Sontag