La Petite Mort

A small death, or a brief release. The figure is a statue—chest exposed, robe slipping—but I look at it as if it's a portrait of a living person. There's something undeniably sexual in the pose, but also something broken. The body reads clearly as female, but the face is harder to read—maybe male, maybe neutral, maybe just worn down by time.

There's a tension here between softness and stone, between pleasure and collapse. Between something surrendered and something taken. It's unclear whether this is a moment of pain, of ecstasy, or both. That ambiguity is exactly what drew me to it.

When I photograph people, I'm always aware of the ethics of the gaze. Photography can be invasive—sometimes violent. But with statues and paintings, there's freedom. They're open to being seen. So ironically, in these images—of things that aren't alive—you see the most face, the most intimacy.