Finaliste

Part of THE ARCHIVIST, this image explores the obsession with cataloging emotions, an impossible task, much like 19th-century phrenology’s attempt to map personality onto the skull. The Archivist, echoing Cesare Lombroso’s pseudo-scientific theories, seeks to preserve feelings as if they were measurable, tangible. But emotions resist containment.

The man’s grip suggests both control and tenderness, preservation and dissolution. The distortions, created through analog layering, mirror the way memory warps in the act of archiving. In trying to capture the intangible, The Archivist risks becoming trapped in the very emotions he seeks to study.

This image is created using an old enlarger as a camera, and a 4x5 paper negative.