THE GHOST
Experimental photography, portrait & mixed media - 2023
The Ghost is a series of portraits created with my friend Éléonore, continuing my research into circuit bending and the element of unpredictability introduced by the modified camera.
The title refers to the idea of the “ghost in the machine”, a concept that has shaped many imaginaries surrounding our relationship with technology, and which I encountered through works such as Ghost in the Shell and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In different ways, these narratives question the boundaries between humans and machines, between what we control and what seems to escape us.
Within my own practice, this idea takes a much simpler and more tangible form. When I deliberately provoke a malfunction inside a camera, I create the conditions for an error without being able to determine exactly what it will produce. For a brief moment, part of the image escapes my control. Forms, colours and distortions appear without having been drawn or precisely anticipated.
It is within this space that I like to imagine the “ghost”: not as a literal presence hidden inside the machine, but as something unexpected that emerges in the gap between my intention and the behaviour of the apparatus.
In The Ghost, this disruption encounters portraiture and, for the first time within this research, the human body itself. Éléonore’s face and silhouette remain recognisable, while the camera fragments, duplicates and transforms them. The glitch does not necessarily destroy the portrait; instead, it allows another way of seeing it to emerge.
The series culminates in a 130 × 80 cm print, which I further transformed by hand after printing. I covered its surface with hundreds of small drops of hot glue, inspired by raindrops running across the windows of a train.
This introduces another form of alteration, this time entirely physical. After allowing the camera’s electronics to disrupt the image at the moment of capture, I intervene once again on its surface as a photographic object. The transparent drops interact with the image and the light falling across it, creating another layer between the original photograph and what we perceive.
Perhaps the ghost is not something that inhabits the machine, but something that appears for a moment when the machine stops giving us exactly the image we expected.
