Charlotte Iwaniuk

Photo series | 2014
Funded by the Women’s Promotion Fund

Our sense of sight provides us with the greatest knowledge, revealing many of the subtle disparities in the world and in other people. Seeing often evokes mazement, which is the origin of all philosophical thinking. In the work »Identify«, the artist explores the fundamental question of metaphysics: What do we actually see? With her camera, the photographer accompanies people she knows, who, like everyone else, are occupied with finding out who they are. She studies her subjects as unobtrusively and objectively as possible in hopes that the viewer will approach the photos in the same way.

Like her role models William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, her eye sweeps across the daily lives of her subjects. She photographs the unimportant details, the utterly mundane. Things that people hardly notice anymore in the hectic pace of life. But it’s exactly these things that describe people, which comprise their identity. The result is a portrait series without the portrayed individuals – an attempt to emphasise the poetic beauty of everyday life.