Artu Nepomuceno

"It is with hubris that humanity thinks of itself as the masters of the world. And that by photographing ourselves, we believe that we can derive a certain wisdom about the ethereal from the ephemeral. We are born, we welt and we vanish. And yet the world endures. The world changes but it stays the same. What then is the role of photography? Should we think of photographs as markers of our immortality, which is to say, what is left is not just a vision of us, but our identity persisting in time beyond us? Or should we think of portraiture not in terms of ends, finalities and finitude? We could think of such objects as autonomous beings apart from us, a "dupli-cording," if we are to use the historian Gilles Massot's terms. These traces of who we are can exist independently from us, allowing us to occupy the same world as our facsimile. This thought lends credence to the claim in portraiture that we do not only try to capture how our subjects look like, but rather, a portrait, we imagine, is a representation of who those people are. It is physiognomy made legible through writing with light, that portraits are not just forms and figures on a frame, but are attributes of us, made visible and free. It is us, whether in part or as a whole, but is also not us, sovereign to live its own becoming. If the world indeed is in love with itself, perhaps, it is through the spectacle of the portrait that God, nature, or some deity is able to see itself as an abomination, the likeness of a human haunting itself through its spectral gaze." - Stephanie Frondoso on the "The World In Love With Itself" Exhibition.