Gathering: Meta-photography

This project is an attempt to think through the act of photography itself. What once functioned as an apparatus for seeing and recording now finds itself staring back into its own reflection. The camera appears not as a mediator of perception, but as an autonomous and thinking body, independent of the photographer. Photography here is no longer concerned with the external world; rather, it speaks of the desire to see—the moment when the image reveals the conditions of its own production and turns self-consciously toward a state of anonymity. Within these photographs, the photographer, in the conventional sense, no longer exists. The camera circulates among the hands of those attending a gathering, assuming the position of a thinking subject. The digital interventions applied to each image gesture toward the anonymity of the photographic object and seek to estrange the very notion of photography itself. A question that continually returns to me is this: why do we photograph?