embodied image-making.
My practice unfolds at the intersection of experimental image-making and symbolic inquiry. Grounded in both mystical and anthropological frameworks, my work investigates the human body as a carrier of memory, time, and transformation—a vessel through which symbols are not only inscribed but also embodied. I am drawn to the ways in which symbols—whether archetypal, sacred, or cultural—mediate our perception of the world, structuring belief, ritual, and identity across time and space. In this inquiry, the body becomes more than a subject; it is an active site of translation, reverberating with ancestral knowledge, intuitive gesture, and affective residue.
Photography, in its most elemental form, is not merely a tool for documentation—it is a conduit for presence, absence, and becoming. I work primarily with cameraless techniques, especially photograms, which bypass the lens in favor of direct material engagement with light-sensitive surfaces. This analog process allows me to engage with photography as a tactile and durational act, where light functions not just as illumination, but as inscription. Photograms—historically employed by artists such as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy—create indexical imprints that hover between representation and abstraction, evidence and apparition. These spectral images bear the trace of what has touched them, evoking what theorist Georges Didi-Huberman calls “the survival of the image”—its capacity to haunt, to linger, to carry the weight of what has been.
My use of experimental photographic processes emerges from a desire to work against fixed forms of seeing. Rather than capturing the world as it appears, I am interested in revealing what eludes the eye: the energetic, the symbolic, the ancestral. Working with film, analog cameras, and contact-based techniques such as photograms and lumen prints, I position the image as a threshold—an encounter between the body, the material world, and light itself. Each work is the result of an alchemical negotiation between presence and trace, permanence and impermanence.
This process-based approach allows me to engage photography as a form of embodied knowledge—a ritual of recording that is not passive but performative. It is in the act of making, of arranging, exposing, and waiting, that I come closest to a deeper mode of listening. The resulting images are not answers, but sites of inquiry: visual echoes that invite the viewer into a sensorial and symbolic dialogue with the unknown.
In a world saturated with instantaneous digital capture, I turn to the slowness, fragility, and materiality of analog processes to ask different questions—ones that dwell in uncertainty, liminality, and the poetics of time.
Sophie Bonet, 2025