Editors note:

Containing both text and series of photographs, this chapter “combines a photographic project with reflections on photography. Taking her starting point in the photographer looking at herself in the mirror, she conciders a number of far-reaching questions: Does the mirror image convey her presence or her absence? Is the photographer she sees in the mirror a subject or an object? And how does the mirror image relate to the photographic portrait? Niether presence nor absence, it seems the portrait is appearance. The mirror, producing not only a physical reflection also prompts a philosophical reflection, which Pazdniakova developes with the help of phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes), American pragmatism (Shusterman), and post-Marxism (Lefebvre), and, on the other hand, of two contemporary artists who thematize the photographic practice, Erwin Wurm and Crispin Gurholt. In fact, in order to understand what it is that appears in the photographic portrait, Pazdniakova launches her own photographic project. She invites real sitters to reflect her taking their pictures, as though they were mirror images of her: the photographer needs her sitters in order to become present in her absence, and the sitters who are present are no more than images of the asent one. It turns out there is no strict borderline to be drawn between original and imitation, appearance turns into simulacrum, the sitter into the apparition of a phantom. Midway between fact andfiction, the image opens boundless possibilities of image production”.

Mikkel B. Tin, Inrtoduction, pp. 27-28.

Summary:

This project is a combination of a text and photographic series. It has a main focus on the photographic experience rather than a perception of ready photographs. Through one photographer looking at herself in the mirror it posts a questions of photographic representation, self-image, nature and borderlines of photography as a phenomenon.

These questions are discussed, on one hand, with a help of phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes), American pragmatism (Shusterman) and post-marxism (Lefebvre), and photographic practice, on the other. Photography here becomes a research method, where an interactive photographic project is both playing an epistemological role and at the same time turns into a subject of research.

In the first place, this idea of my project comes directly from the photographic process, where communication between a photographer and a sitter takes the major part.

Secondly, I base my project on the concept of the ‘visible see-er’, introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his essay “Eye and Mind". From the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen follows a manifestation of the ‘mirror’. “Man is a mirror for man” - says Merleau-Ponty. If we apply this passage to the photographic process, we see that the mirror illustrates the reversibility of see-er and seen. Such is the case when in order to get the sitter to perform a desired move, I automatically show it with my own body, and when the sitter, immediately grasping the meaning of my move, mirrors me in return. Thus, applying to this situation the transformation of seeing into being-seen, when I see the other mirroring me, I become being-seen to myself and vice versa.

I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk around them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I look for another one. In my photographs the appearance of the other turns into a two-way portal for seeing both the other and myself. The other appears as a sculpture shaped by the mirroring act I ask him or her to perform.