Ilka Sankari

Impossible Science

"From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star"

— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

I have always been interested in essential photographic questions, wondering what it means to represent others' bodies, why we make certain choices when constructing portraits, and how relationships between photographer and subject influence the art. In this body of work, I photographed my grandmother over several months in a ritualistic exercise in documentation. It was an exploration into observation, admiration, and ultimately futility.

I was inspired by the ideas of trace and punctum in photography, by Barthes' book "Camera Lucida", and by Susan Sontag's "On Photography" among other things. The photograph is essentially a faint impression of someone’s presence, and a testimony to their life. It is also a manifestation of our collective desire to stop time, to preserve life. I explored photography's history of and potential for navigating fears of loss and mortality through documentation and ritual. I engaged in a repetitive, meditative process that was based on the idea of trying to stop time with a photograph, the most impossible task. In doing so, I was able to explore my questions about what makes photography a unique medium and why I’m always drawn back to portraiture.

In the most fundamental sense, every photograph is a record of presence, and every photographer is the architect of their own narrative about the past. I kept my approach simple, literally skin deep, to play with the ideas of preserving a past that is never exactly as it was, that exists only in a flat piece of art. The final installation illustrates my ideas of reaching for something that you can never quite access through a photograph.

@ilkasankari \\ @ilkasphotos