A Kodak Moment
There's a personal erotic reality. To be and to be seen, to want and to be wanted, these desires take form in sexual display. Among humans sexual display has different values depending on whether it's private, which is acceptable, or public, where it is pornography or erotica. Even erotica has shady connotations because of the devaluation of the pleasure principle in Western culture. Yet because sexuality is such a powerful force we all feel a desire to communicate our personal reaction or else to see how others behave. In this process we inform ourselves / others and create shared culture.
A Kodak Moment is a validation of the erotic quality in human life.
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A Kodak Moment is about the pleasure of being seen and of the gaze. It is recorded in a new form of digital immortality which competes with the permanence of marble sculpture and ancient oil paintings, and trancends the transient and private venue of photography and motion film.
A Kodak Moment was a collaboration between myself and my girlfriend at the time, a visual artist-photographer named Roma Czernysz. Roma, seeing herself in the work, said “She's someone other than I. She lives in the photographs...but also in life. A woman seeing as she is seen, or seeing the way she is seen, not live, but in photographs.”
This work is a positive process of being objectified, where objectifying is not about distance but closeness.