My artistic practice explores images that appear credible even though, on a visual level, what they show may not seem to correspond to reality.
Two spaces merge into one. Perspectives contradict each other. Photographs of different places form a single situation. Our perception connects before our thinking objects.
I am not interested in creating a false reality. Quite the opposite: altering what was photographically found can reveal something that remains hidden in an unchanged representation.
Reality and truth are not the same thing.
This distinction has long interested me beyond the image itself.
Plausibility is a fundamental principle of our perception. We do not constantly verify everything we see, hear or read. We complete. We categorise. We recognise patterns. And we connect new information with what we already believe we know.
This is remarkably efficient.
And remarkably vulnerable.
A text about procrastination recently brought this back to my attention. It explained why some people put things off. It referred to brain scans, the prefrontal cortex, grey matter and surprisingly precise percentages.
It sounded scientific.
Some of it did have a basis in scientific research. Other claims were unsupported, exaggerated or derived from studies that did not actually justify the conclusions being presented.
Yet the text worked.
Not despite its construction, but because of it.
Form creates credibility.
A number appears more precise than a claim. A technical term sounds more authoritative than everyday language. A photograph seems more credible than a description. A statement repeated often enough becomes more familiar than an unfamiliar one.
Familiarity becomes plausibility.
Plausibility can become certainty.
This does not apply only to dubious neuroscience.
Marketing works with it. Conspiracy narratives work with it. Political communication works with it. Social media amplifies it. And generative AI can now produce plausible connections with a speed and sophistication that is new.
The problem, then, is not that images and texts do not simply reproduce reality.
They never did.
What is new is the ease with which plausibility can be produced.
In my images, I place real photographic material into new relationships. I alter transitions, perspectives, repetitions and contexts. Photography continues to carry its claim to proximity to reality. That is precisely what makes it interesting to me.
Because perception does not initially ask for truth.
It looks for coherence.
And if that coherence appears plausible enough, we accept it.
For me, this raises a question that extends far beyond photography:
What makes us accept something as true?
And immediately after:
When do we begin to question our own perception?
Images were never reality.
But we can increasingly no longer afford to forget that.