At what moment do we become an image to ourselves?
8 May 2026
“The body should astonish you more.” — Jacques Lacan.
Despite this, we inhabit our bodies as if their nature were self-evident. We nourish, observe, modify, exhibit, and sometimes conceal them, yet we seldom reflect on their inherent strangeness.
The human body may be the most familiar yet the most incomprehensible phenomenon we encounter.
Sometimes a mirror is enough to spark unease.
A child discovers their reflection and suddenly believes they recognize themselves. Yet what is being recognized? Is it a presence, a unity, or already an image of oneself?
Perhaps we spend our entire lives trying to catch up with that image.
Photography intensifies this sense of disorientation. It appears to stabilize the body, offering a fixed form and visible evidence. Yet some images achieve the opposite, rendering the body even more enigmatic.
Certain portraits do not simply depict a face; they reveal the passage of time through human presence.
My teacher used to say:
“A portrait must show one’s passage on earth.”
Today, I think I understand the silent gravity of that sentence. To photograph is not merely to document appearance. It may require slowing down to perceive an entire life manifesting before us: in a face, a posture, a fatigue, or a hesitant gaze.
Certain photographs seem to know this.
In Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, faces appear to emerge from time itself. In Diane Arbus’s photographs, subjects seem simultaneously intimate and inaccessible, as if something within them continues to resist the image.
This may represent the moment of greatest impact: when a photograph transcends representation and raises fundamental questions about existence.
For we may not truly know what a body is.
We know how to measure, name, monitor, and display the body. Yet do we truly understand what it means to inhabit a visible form?
The body transforms under observation. It changes in the mirror, in love, in memory, and through photography.
Today, in the present era, as screens generate thousands of bodily images each minute, the question becomes increasingly urgent: what occurs when a body can no longer exist apart from its representations? no definitive answer.
I maintain only that certain images continue to compel us to pause before this enigma.
Perhaps this is where photography truly begins: in that essential astonishment, at the threshold where we encounter ourselves anew.
