personal long-term project

DECEPTIVELY QUIET

Deceptively Quiet began with an accident. In 2020, my four-year-old daughter was injured. When we came home from hospital, I stayed close, making her laugh, answering her questions, trying to soften the memory for her. She healed quickly. She returned to school, and within weeks there were no visible traces of what had happened.

Months later, in April 2021, I stopped sleeping. My mind spun in the dark, circling back to that day. In sleepless nights, childhood traumas resurfaced, entangling past and present. One night I picked up my phone and took a self-portrait. Then another. Some nights I slept, but on the restless ones I photographed myself in the glow of the phone screen or under its small, harsh flash. For six months these self-portraits became a ritual. The phone was deliberate: discreet, always present, forcing me to accept its limits: grainy textures, blown-out highlights, muted detail. Over time, photographing began to quiet my nights.

What started as a survival mechanism grew into a long-term project spanning 2020–2025. From this mass of photographs, I later distilled around 160, pairing them with about fifty images of houses, trees, objects, and landscapes, often hazy and dreamlike, hovering between memory and reality. Some are rooted in my family home and childhood, others are fragments of unfamiliar places encountered while traveling. Together they form a dialogue between interior and exterior states: the anxious solitude of sleepless nights and the fragile clarity of daylight that follows.

The work is shaped by questions of memory and perception. How do events leave traces in us when the visible wounds have already faded? How do we translate the private space of trauma into a form that can be shared? Photography here becomes both evidence and transformation. The images are not only documents of insomnia but also attempts to bend reality into something I can live with.

Deceptively Quiet exists as a sequence of images and as a photobook dummy. Its structure mixes self-portraits with transient scenes, weaving them into a rhythm of darkness and light, stillness and unease. The repetition of the self is countered by landscapes and objects that act as symbols of memory, time, and continuity. The project insists the personal is never isolated: it extends outward, touching family, place, and collective experience.

In the end, the work is both a record of trauma and a path through it, mine and my daughter’s, traced one restless night at a time.

2025

(preview - unpublished work)