Not Even Background Noises, 1995
Seven Iris prints, 22x39,5 cm



The first widely available version of Photoshop was released in 1990. With the spread of Photoshop, nothing would ever be the same. The unprecedented ability to manipulate images with software dealt a mortal blow to the notion of photography as an instrument that documented reality. And yet it is precisely tools like Photoshop that enable the emergence of our complex and stratified contemporary reality, a reality inevitably made up of fictive representations and self-representations. It is no longer simply the photographer’s point of view (“I am a camera”) that provides us with partial and subjective realities. Doubt becomes a default mode to survive in the world of pervasive media in which one can manipulate images to make subjects appear not as they are but as you want them to be. By using Photoshop, I eliminated all points of reference, thus making the area a place of ambiguous existence, devoid of all direction, an alien place like the surface of a rocky lifeless planet like Mars. It was almost as if I desired, symbolically, to make a clean sweep of everything that had guided my mental landscapes until that moment. I removed information, certainties, by building vast, deserted, either pre-human or post-human territories where I could construct a new reality. One’s own life experiences can sometimes be a load to bear. They can anchor a person’s mind in mental pathways that are hard to walk out of. Mine was a rite of initiation that would lead me into places I had yet to explore, by making a tabula rasa of my usual time-space coordinates.