What if masculinity is not necessarily a conflict?
Masculinity is often understood through the tension between social expectations and lived experience. Subject and Objectquestions whether this narrative still holds, or whether the contradiction it describes needs to be reconsidered.
Growing up between established gender roles, digital ideals and shifting cultural counter-images, young men encounter competing ideas of what masculinity should look like. The series explores how these ideas shape self-perception and how masculinity is negotiated in relation to others, without assuming a shared experience or a fixed definition of masculine identity.
Made primarily in the private living spaces of the people portrayed, the analogue photographs focus on the moment of being seen. In front of the camera, self-perception meets the gaze of another. Gestures of control, self-presentation and withdrawal may become more pronounced or begin to falter. What happens when performed masculinity becomes unstable within the photographic encounter? Does identity itself shift, or does the image through which it is perceived begin to change?
The camera is not a neutral observer. It intervenes in the encounter and becomes part of the process through which identity takes shape and acquires meaning. The resulting image emerges between the person portrayed, the photographer and the cultural assumptions through which both see and are seen. Who determines what becomes visible as masculine identity? Is the man the subject of his own experience, or does he become the object of another’s interpretation?
Rather than proposing an alternative image of masculinity, Subject and Object questions the conditions through which masculinity is recognised, represented and interpreted. It leaves unresolved what belongs to the person in front of the camera and what emerges through the act of looking.
(The series is currently in progress)
