Appearance
2010 – 2019
Appearance is a portrait series of people singing.
From summer to autumn of 2009, before I began photographing this series, I suffered from a brain ailment of unknown origin which debilitated me. Perhaps because of my unstable condition, my gaze was often drawn to the figures of children. At the same time as wishing I had their energy, I empathized with their apparent precariousness and their vulnerability. It was then that I heard that a musician friend of mine was teaching children to sing, and I felt I wanted to photograph “children who sing.”
Several years later, I happened to see a young man singing a song in an art gallery. He was just sitting on a bench and singing with no accompaniment. He seemed to be unguarded, but the solemn atmosphere of his demeanor enchanted those around him. In that moment, I felt that there was something that people had in common when they were singing, whether they were children or adults, and I began to photograph “adults who sing.”
