Moving Figures
Living beings are often moving and faded figures.
They become ephemeral presences that seem to float between the physical and immaterial worlds. They are not fully present but not wholly absent either: they are bridges between these two states, transitory manifestations that challenge our perception of reality.
There is a sense of suspended time in which people become luminous traces,
evanescent shadows that intertwine with the surrounding space.
Susan Sontag said, " .... a photograph is not only an image .... it is also a trace ....., like a footprint ....".
In my mind, it is visually fluid, in movement, almost a whisper,
a sign of life.
The moving figures seem to carry fragments of an elsewhere, suggesting stories
that remain beyond our reach. Perhaps this is the "urban sublime" described by Walter Benjamin,
who said modern cities are places of fleeting encounters and transience.
Urban night photography transforms these encounters into something more profound,
capturing people's movement and their existence in a present that slips away.
The urban lights amplify this effect, enveloping the figures in an aura that makes them almost unreal.
Moving figures recall the liminal, an intermediate space between presence and absence.
Likewise, these presences are never just ghosts: they carry with them the weight of what is real.
They represent the essence of the human being as constantly in transit,
always halfway between what has been and what will be.
“Everything flows” (Eraclitus)
I am looking for an emotional tension between the visible and the invisible,
between what the image shows and what it suggests.
As a photographer and spectator, I feel like the protagonist
of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd".
I am called to ask myself: "Who are these figures? Where are they going?".
The moving figures become mirrors of ourselves, who often pass through life
without leaving lasting traces, consumed by the frenzy and the ephemeral.
The ghostly figures captured in these shots evoke the passage of time
and suggest the instability of our very existence.