Pins and Needles

Pins and Needles represents a hatching, something blooming. It is a large format photographic series combining portraits, landscapes, and staged scenes and evoking the multi-sensorial experience of getting back to our body - of shaking off a numbness.

Pins and Needles is a photographic series combining portraits, landscapes, and other staged scenes. This work evokes an emergence of senses – a whole generation awakening after the long pandemic winter and who is slowly learning to feel again. I have been trying to convey physical sensations through photography; particularly this feeling of having pins and needles, of waking up from a numbness. To me, this book is like a hatching, a blooming. It is about stretching out our limbs, shaking off the languor. It is about finally coming out, opening the door, being blinded by the Sun.

I started working on this project in the Summer of 2022 while I was doing a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, in California. It was not planned. But when I arrived there, after being confined, I found myself noticing phenomena in a way I hadn’t in a long time, in a way I hadn’t since before the pandemic. I was noticing the interaction between the fog and my skin, the behaviour of the animals, the traces we leave around us. I felt weirdly out of place yet very much in touch with the natural world, as if being outside again brought me back to being an animal. I started recreating those phenomena I was noticing into staged photographs. It was unexpected, raw, and in many ways, destabilizing.

Even though this series was born in the late covid, it is not a project about this moment that impacted us all. Rather, it is about the universal experience of getting back to our senses, getting back to our body. This sensorial experience can happen after a confinement like here, but also after a convalescence, a depression, when coming back to a place we haven’t been to in a very long time. It is about the relation, and sometimes disconnect, that we entertain with our environment.
Pins and Needles is about a desire to connect – to embody a place, an attempt at translating its multi-sensorial aspects in a visual manner, to notice the elements present and the passing phenomena, and to stage them, recreate them into photographs. We live in a hyper-connected world yet it seems that we’re always seeking other forms of connections, deeper, more authentic, with each other, with our environment. We are looking for a grounding, an osmosis. This series represents for me this state of vulnerability, and of receptivity we find ourselves in – our senses in full alert.

I believe that the main challenge for this work has been to represent multisensorial experiences in a photographic manner – how does one show thirst? Numbness? What are visual metaphors that can be employed to convey these feelings? I always write alongside photographs as a way to bring this out-of-frame context into the work, but I wished that for this series all of it would be sensed through the images alone. This exercise is very important for my artistic practice as it brings together branches of my work that I always found were too different to be used into a single homogeneous project – the fleeting, phenomenological approach to trying to capture all that we cannot grasp, and the staged, static and planned practice of large format photography. I am very excited about combining those elements into what will be my very first photobook.

The recreation of moments that seem mundane, the exaggeration of certain gestures, the lighting, are all methods I use here to evoke a certain strangeness. The juxtaposition of people, places and objects we wouldn’t necessarily imagine together become elements that we question and that nourish the notion of “not-quite” that inhabits the series. Through photographic staging, a cinematic lighting and indiscernible characters, I navigate the blur and create a narration guided by suggestion. We are left wondering what happened just before the image or what will happen right after. This project talks of touching and of being touched, of reaching a hand in front of us and seeing what responds.

In terms of aesthetic, I am inspired by some work by David Lynch that gather a cinematic lighting and some strangeness in the scenes, by Jeff Wall’s practice of recreating mundane moments into staged 4x5 photographs, by Yohanne Lamoulère and Julien Magre’s work on portraits, by Alec Soth’s ability to combine portraits, landscapes and details in very consistent series (and always books), by Trent Davis Bailey’s depiction of place and phenomena.

The people who are photographed in the series seem to be suspended in time, they are in inadequacy with their environment, not knowing how to act, to interact. Here are some elements that I was thinking about while making those images:

•          Sensorial experiences – bodily textures, goosebumps, imprints on skin, wetness, sunburns.

•          Confinement and languor – beds, curtains, blankets.

•          Inside/outside – windows, looking out, cars, windshields.

•          Animal/natural behaviour – traces, nests, cocoons, fur, actual animals when I had the chance.

•          Disorientation – fog, blur, night time photographs, camouflage.

Regarding technical specifics, the book is 24x30 cm as I wanted to keep the 4x5 format of the large format camera I used (not all images are shot with the 4x5, around 80%). I am hoping to print the book cover on fabric, to bring back tactility, and the texture of the blanket on the image.

The sequencing was quite challenging as the images show different lighting situations, inside, outside, daytime, night-time, portraits, landscapes etc. While working through the design of this book with Lewis Chaplin, Giuseppe Oliverio and Camilla Marrese in the context of the Masterclass on photobook making held by dear you PhMuseum, I was looking for strategies in the sequencing and design of the book to convey those feelings I mean to express.

For example, we find a lot of windows in the book. A lot of being inside looking outside, so I decided to use these windows as section separators in the book. We follow a few spreads of images shot inside, then a window come as a transition and takes us outside – as if turning the page was like seeing through a window.

To convey a certain confusion, the feeling of being lost – in thoughts and in place – I have been working with blurred images – as if having our vision out of focus. It was another strategy to sequence the book, to bring some softness to it. I tend to match these blur break images with the gazes of the people photographed, with its direction.

It has been a wonderful experience so far, at all stages – imagining pictures, location scouting, making the images, the reveal, expansive discussions with peers and mentors, thinking through sequence, design, object. I would be so very happy to have this project published through PhMuseum, as I feel that this dummy wouldn’t exist without your guidance and support. For what may come and for all you have done already, thank you.