Materia by Vic Bakin

‘Materia’ explores the instability within photography itself. Produced during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the project shifts its attention from what photography depicts to the material from which photographs are made.

The starting point for ‘Materia’ was a pair of portraits of the same man, taken by the artist ten years apart (2014–2024). These portraits revealed not only what had changed, but also what had strangely remained the same. Within each portrait, the accumulation of time became more visible than the passage of time itself. 

Around the same period, Bakin started printing on outdated Ukrainian photographic paper from the 1960s to the 2000s, each pack preserved in different conditions. Some sheets had faded, others carried mold, traces of fingerprints, or almost no contrast. Parallels emerged between these worn photographic surfaces and the vulnerability of the body and its skin in the portraits.

“For me, thinking happens through making. I rarely begin with a clear concept. Instead, I make pictures first and then spend months trying to understand what they are telling me.” — Vic Bakin

Projecting these negatives onto this aged paper, Bakin watched how the material responded. The image hesitantly emerged, often faded, sometimes weakened, and rarely behaving as you might expect. Repeating his process, the instability of the paper eventually began to matter more than the image itself. Resistance of material, and an embrace of repetition, chance, and variation become fundamental parts of the project. 

In ‘Materia’, Bakin’s photographs admit their own instability. Interested in the moment when the image becomes matter, and when matter begins to resist representation, the artist has created a delicate study of what happens when photography itself begins to age, fail, and resist the image it is meant to carry. In doing so, ‘Materia’ is a project that does not illustrate time, but rather uniquely reveals how time participates in the making of images.