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This is the confession of a man who sought to see himself reflected in the eyes of everyone else. It is an achingly sad declaration of the burden of being a photographer. He despaired over his ineluctable fate but it was precisely this fate that created the solitary photographer we know and celebrate.
Nowadays we exist thanks to images: Imago, ergo sum. The adaptation of the corollary to our condition as Homo pictor gives us ‘I photograph, therefore I am’, because there is no doubt that the camera has become one of the vital contraptions that encourage us to venture into the world and traverse it both visually and intellectually: whether we realise it or not, photography is also a form of philosophy.
Alex Majoli’s approach to image making constitutes a profound reflection upon the conditions of theatricality that are implicit in both photography and a world we have come to understand as something that is always potentially photographable. If the world is expecting to be photographed, it exists in a perpetual state of potential theatre. Whether it is a surveillance camera, a smart phone camera, or a photojournalist’s lens, the omnipresence of photography has created a heightened state of camera-consciousness.
The daily encounter with reality, with the fictions and surrogates, the ambiguous aspects, poetical or alienating, seems to deny any way out of the labyrinth, whose walls are always more illusive even to the point of confusing ourselves with them.
Through her pictures, she takes a stand for the vibrancy of our thoughts, the importance of our customs. In that sense, her total body of work serves as some kind of manifesto or thesis, which argues that we are all worthy of attention, we are all interesting enough to be looked at—not regarded with bias, as some novelty, but truly seen, with dignity, respect, and reverence.
When does a boy become a man, a girl become a woman. And what constitutes a girl, boy, man, woman, in a time of unsettled ideas about gender, masculinity, and femininity. All of the variables marry assumptions, centuries of tradition, and prejudice to written and unwritten laws and codes of conduct.