Shadow of preservation
2024_2025
One color, Silk screen prints on fabric
73cm x 200cm/ Different sizes
Video installation, mixed media animation
Souvenir photography emerged with the development of modern travel and tourism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As cameras became more accessible, photographing oneself in front of landmarks, monuments, and historic sites became a widespread cultural practice. These images were not only records of journeys, but symbolic gestures through which people attempted to place themselves within history and collective memory. Standing in front of monuments or ruins, people position their bodies in relation to something meant to endure. The monument represents permanence, authority, and historical continuity, while the photograph promises to freeze a fleeting personal presence. In this sense, souvenir photography is not only about travel, but about identity, a way of saying:
I was there, I belonged, I existed in relation to this place.
However, this desire to preserve identity through photography is fragile. While monuments remain, the human presence captured in the image is temporary. Faces age, names disappear, and personal histories dissolve into anonymity. Over time, the photograph outlives the individual not as a living identity, but as an image detached from its original context, an anonymous fragment within an archive.
Since 2023, I have been collecting souvenir photographs from family archives, friends, flea markets, and second-hand shops across different countries. In 2024/2025, I began printing selected images onto large white fabric using silkscreen printing, a method that reflects repetition and mechanical reproduction. I chose fabric because it feels unstable and unfinished, capable of holding both presence and absence. By removing the vertical threads (warp) from the human figures and leaving only the horizontal threads (weft), the bodies slowly lose their solidity. The monument remains intact, while the human identity dissolves into a fragile shadow.
Identity appears here not as a fixed essence, but as something layered, partial, and unstable, woven from many threads, of which photography captures only one. Alongside the textile works, I present a short looped video based on a family archive Super 8 film showing a tourist feeding pigeons in front of a monument. This familiar action exists largely to be photographed. By erasing the figure frame by frame, I emphasize how photography preserves gestures and images, but not identity. What remains is not the person, but a trace suspended between memory and disappearance.
