it all goes away / but only for a second / you let go of me

My project examines the struggles that come with seeking intimacy, as well as the process of forming one’s self-perception, through the lens of photography. My research started with a text by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, called “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma”. The text is a metaphor for interpersonal relationships, and claims that the closer people get to each other, the more likely they are to hurt each other, in the same way that hedgehogs huddled together risk poking each other with their quills. Another major source for the project was American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley’s theory of “The Looking Glass Self”. Cooley argues that the way people form their perception of themselves is based on how they think other people view them, after which they combine all those assumed perceptions into one.

Using these texts as my foundation, I aim to explore interpersonal relationships on a spectrum. On one end, complete isolation, and on the other, the loss of a person’s self-identity through their relationships with others. I use primarily polaroids, and polaroid emulsion lifts on paper, to capture metaphorical images and illustrate the ideas found in the aforementioned texts. I also place polaroid emulsions on skin, and have the models interact with them, in an effort to show the act of internalizing another person’s perception of you. Through these images, I seek to provoke thought and introspection about how we relate to ourselves and others in the context of our social environments.