Helen in the Maze

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“For this new chapter of my research, the initial theme was loving one’s own image more than oneself. Where other than Milan, a global fashion capital, does a place exist that is better suited for reflecting on a topic which is actually very old? – that is, the rift between being and appearance, between image and identity, a question first posed by Parmenides in about 500 bce, but still of great topical interest today. Our lives are steeped in images and we are constantly besieged by images. We love our image, and we cultivate it and attend to it. We delegate to it the task of representing us. We have made it a cult object. Ours is a civilisation of images, we are told. Image conditions what we buy, and to a great extent determines our frustrations and our happiness. Compulsively, we send images to friends, and to recipients we do not even know; social networks reveal the most intimate moments of our daily lives, in deference to the principle that nothing exists unless it is not communicated. This obsessive need for self-representation, which is such a distinctive part of our age, is radically redefining the functions of the portrait. The photographic portrait is the symbolic place where the terms image and identity collide. Every portrait is a projection onto photosensitive paper of an inextricable bundle of expectations, urgent needs, ambitions, challenges, and fears, all in an endless game of mirrors, pitting what I think I know of myself against what I would like others to see, what I discover unexpectedly against what I dream of being. A portrait is an instrument of introspection, of growth, of examination. An opportunity to enhance one’s self-awareness Every portrait questions its own subject. What pleasure, or apprehension, curiosity or wonder, what need to share, or show o€, led you to pose? The need to vanquish time, to leave an enduring trace of your likeness? To indelibly set down your real appearance, or what you thought, or would always have liked to be? Every portrait asks a crucial question of its subject, and constantly re-poses it: who am I?”.