jotapeg

“I use the city as a stage and transform the physical space into a psychological one.”

here are as many ways to tell a story as there are to lie about it. Mine is a journey across the tales and personas that together formed the core of my family. A metaphorical flow of lives now merged into myself: the last of my kin.

The great wars that upset Europe during the last century are the common thread, the grim background and prime mover of the migrations that allowed the paths to intertwine.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus tricked Death by trapping Thanatos in chains. Once Thanatos was bound by chains, no one died on Earth, this is why Sisyphus was punished to roll an enormous rock up a hill, only to watch it come back to hit him, repeating this action for eternity.

How we used to think about the world is changing radically every day. Religion is replaced by science, we are flooded by images every day, we want instant access to knowledge. Photography as a medium has the ability to capture everything that’s in front of the camera, the machinery sees even what the human eye is not capable of. We can see universes, stars exploding, microscopic worlds, atom bomb detonation with the safety of the far distance. Through these images, we think we can get closer to understand how the world is functioning without ever experiencing or seeing it through our own eyes.

Speaking at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, Iranian president at the time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed: “In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country.”

While most Western nations now officially accept homosexuality and some even same-sex marriage, homosexuality is still punishable by death in Iran. Homosexuals are not allowed to live out their sexuality there. Their only options are either to choose transsexuality, which is tolerated by law but considered pathological, or to flee.

In Denizli, a town in Turkey, hundreds of gay Iranians are stuck in a transit zone, their lives on hold, hoping against hope to be welcomed into a host country someday where they can start afresh and come out of the closet. Set in this state of limbo, where anonymity is the best protection, my photographs explore the sensitive concepts of identity and gender and seek to restore to each of these men the face their country stole from them.

An ongoing portrait project, ‘Rodeo Girls‘ shows young girls from Texas who compete in rodeos. With fundamentally different ideas about their femininity and a contrasting attitude toward gender roles, Szwarc’s subjects engage in the activity traditionally reserved for men. Warsaw-born, LA-based photographer creates poetic portraits deeply rooted in the tradition of American documentary, while undermining stereotypes and beliefs American society holds for women. That said, Szwarc is also fascinated by the girls’ great physical strength and their dominance over animals. “I am interested in the limitation these girls face in expressing their femininity and the transference of it onto animals,” says the photographer.

Experiencing the gaze of the Other, feeling starred at, brings a double realization; Beyond the body and the organ of vision, what we see is a conscience, the subject of that gaze. We are confronted to the Other, to its existence separated from us. His gaze brings us the proof of his conscience. This gaze also confronts us with our own existence, when someone looks at us, we see what he sees, us. We are the object of this gaze.

The Other, the way we look at him and the way he looks at us, plays a fundamental part in the way we characterize ourselves. Its inaccessibility generates fantasies and fictions, that in turn shape our perception of the self.    

The images in this series were submitted to an eye tracking test, a technology that records and represents the movements of the eyes of a spectator on an image. Participants were invited to view a series of photography, including their own portrait, while being submitted to this technology. The dots appearing on the images show us where the gaze of the spectators paused, creating at turn an image of the subject as seen through the eyes of a panel of viewers, and a representation of the gaze of a spectator on his own portrait.

The results of these tests, their graphical representations, become the tangible trace of a gaze, reminding of a persistence of vision. The different paths taken by the eyes, the different ways of observing our environment, are all clues of the individuality of the participants, of the existence of separate consciences with their own free will and judgement on our person. These representations explore the differences between the image we have of ourselves and the one that is created in the Other’s gaze, differences that question the existence of a “true self”. The results create an image of self image, a form of realization of the fantasy of seeing through someone’s eyes, of seeing ourselves through someone’s eyes.

Born in March 2nd 1986 in France

Night no longer exists. City lights cover up the stars, and cell phone screens lighten even the darkest of alleyways. And soon, imagine a world in which our lights render even the sun gratuitous. In the darkness of space, light is a beacon of hope. What if darkness in our world once again overtook the night and as an affect, transforming even the most insignificant light into an exception – a mystical phenomenon ? In a world in black and blue, the single incandescence of a bulb could be the greatest promise of an adventure about to start.

“I am a visual artist based in Paris, creating cinematographic and narrative photography series dealing with human interactions and conditions. My work raises questions about our future, the threats that our civilization is facing, the quest meaning and our relationship with technologies.