April 15, 2026 - My work as a photographic artist is deeply informed by my early training in experimental theatre, particularly within lineages shaped by Jerzy Grotowski and Augusto Boal. While I did not ultimately find my place as a performer, the methodologies I absorbed—centered on the body, presence, and psychological immediacy—became foundational to how I now approach image-making.
Both Grotowski and Boal rejected spectacle in favor of something more essential. In Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” the actor’s body becomes the primary site of meaning, stripped of excess and illusion. Boal’s work similarly activates the body as a space of lived experience, social tension, and transformation. These approaches privileged process over product, encounter over presentation. That philosophy remains central to my photographic practice.
I approach the camera not as a tool for documentation, but as a space of performance—one in which the body is not posed but revealed. My subjects are not simply seen; they are engaged as presences, often caught in states of transition, tension, or ambiguity. Gesture, posture, and proximity carry more weight than narrative clarity. In this way, the body becomes a primary text—one that resists easy interpretation but invites psychological projection.
I am reminded of a story told to me by Gilles Peress about Henri Cartier-Bresson—or HCB, as he called him—that the act of photography is an attempt to arrive between the thought and the word. That the image exists prior to language, as something more immediate and less resolved. This notion resonates deeply with my own approach. If the photograph can exist in that space—before articulation, before explanation—then it retains a kind of raw psychological charge that resists being reduced to narrative.
Grotowski’s concept of *via negativa*, the act of removing rather than adding, has also shaped my visual language. I am less interested in constructing images than in stripping them down—eliminating what feels unnecessary until only a charged residue remains. This often results in images that feel incomplete or unresolved, resisting closure in favor of something more lingering and indeterminate. Rather than offering answers, the work holds space for contradiction, discomfort, and doubt.
From Boal, I carry an awareness of relational dynamics—the tension between observer and participant, subject and viewer. His collapsing of boundaries between performer and audience informs my interest in intimacy that borders on discomfort. The viewer is not positioned as neutral; they are implicated. There is often a sense of intrusion, of being too close, of witnessing something not entirely meant to be seen. This destabilization is intentional.
Although my path diverged from theatre into photography, I have come to understand that my instincts as an image-maker are rooted in those early embodied practices. Directing, rather than acting, may have been my natural inclination—but even that has translated. I do not direct in a conventional sense; instead, I create conditions in which something can unfold. The photograph becomes less a fixed object and more a trace of an encounter.
In a medium often dominated by polish and spectacle, I remain committed to an anti-spectacular approach—one that prioritizes presence, imperfection, and psychological depth. My images are not designed to resolve, but to linger—to exist in the space between documentation and performance, and—if I am successful—just before language, where meaning remains unstable and the body speaks before it can be fully understood.