I like the idea that light is coming from the shadow. In the photographic act, we prevent the loss of light, the light crystallizes. The invention of photography plays a role in this quest to freeze the light, to stop what's lost as soon as the light disappears. When we cease to exist, our eyes lose their ability to hold light and become dark. Defining myself as a very quiet and observant person, my images are often built on feelings of vulnerability, loss and emptiness. They tend to make visible moments and sensations that are difficult to tell but that inhabit our bodies and spaces in silence. By the act of photographing, I am not into a desire to translate reality: my aim is more to find connections between real life and our internal mindset. My primary goal is for my images to make people feel rather than just see.
As a result of being raised in a difficult environment, my photographic practice has enabled me to reflect and develop as an individual, and it is sometimes a tool that I utilize to find meaning. The practice of photography is cathartic, it’s a way to reclaim reality, an attempt to create a place and exist differently and not only through my social condition.
I have a deep confidence in the evocative power of images, even at a time when the image has sometimes become virtual and created by software. I think of the image with a poetic perspective, like a sculptor or a painter. My preference is to work in a state of emotional overwhelm, which allows me to feel absorbed in the space I work in. I make an effort to highlight the smallest details.
This series of images builds on my anger and inner wounds, sometimes with a sense of helplessness as a common thread. I try to perceive glimmers, I accept the tension of being a still vulnerable living body. This ongoing project intervenes as a process of self-healing, as here by the look and the photographic act we could maybe try to heal ourselves, to accept our fragilities and to use dissociative, melancholic and disillusioned states to perceive what surrounds us otherwise.
Fiona Segadães Da Silva