Spiegelbild
I started taking photographs of my boyfriend, envying and admiring in a way his freedom in the shots, the freedom that I want for myself. I wish that the intimate, nude portraits of him will serve as the liberating end of the struggle for my personal freedom; a struggle that goes back to my childhood and the responsibility I felt to fill in the gap that somebody else left behind, but is also tightly connected to the beginning of my relationship and the self-harm I was causing myself.
© Costas Kazantzis
Have you ever gone back over memory?
If she doesn’t exist, what do you do?
What if her absence conceals the answer?
What if you finally attempt to fill in the blanks with all your means?
Does time play a role in this process?
Is there a way out?
© Costas Kazantzis
Spiegelbild, I would say, is a project that has to do with identity, another form of a diary, a visual diary. The people who play a big role in my life are mixed with images that come from the last two years, as well as the past, and finally are projected, together with my own auto portraits, on it. In the process, it is unavoidable for me to refer to the family album. Sometimes, I have the need to process it’s content in my own way, to reproduce it once more, to present it in a different way.
© Costas Kazantzis
Through connections and parallelisms, using the photographic medium in many of its ways (analog, polaroid, digital), I wish to give the project a sense of writing notes.
In the beginning, the notes may seem chaotic, random, but I hope that in the end they will become clearer, just like rereading a diary, and bring me a step closer to myself.
all images and text © Costas Kazantzis