“Conditions”, by Inbal Lily Koliner
As a child, whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always felt puzzled. The only answer I’ve managed to come up with was that ‘I’m certainly not going to be like everybody else’. What exactly this difference might consist of, I couldn’t – of course – specify.
As I grew up, and haven’t turned out quite the anarchist I might have had in mind, I’ve realized that a unique identity isn’t measured according to social labels. Yet, to this very day, I still see freedom of thought and expression and a pluralistic attitude towards others as highly important.
With this belief in mind, there’s no wonder I was keen to participate in Andres’s project – a project which “raises questions about social norms, and invites the viewer to enter a world in which boundaries fail to create differences, while differences are not only accepted, but even embraced”.
Interacting with subjects on a sociological as well as on a personal level, this work deals with individuals and individual choices. It reminds each and every one of us that we’re free to make our own decisions and to ask ourselves where we want to go.
Andres and I have been close friends for several years when he invited me to be a part of this project and I was curious to see how it might feel like to work with him, using methods that until then I’ve only heard about.
I discovered that staging a situation allows Andres’s photographer-subject relationships to stay true to his natural way of thinking. Instead of trying to spontaneously capture an “authentic” intimate moment – an attitude which might have been stressful and demanding for me – or even to re-produce such a moment from memory, he framed an abstraction of it, composed in a visual arrangement of me standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at my reflection.
This method allows him to go beyond the documented experience. The result doesn’t describe certain surroundings, nor does it portray a specific life-style, but rather exposes raw, untraditional forms of vulnerability, suggesting a sense of familiarity.
This is Andres’s visual narrative, a narrative which calls for mutual respect and acceptance while offering a prism of possible conclusions regarding cultural behavior.