Lily Vogt

“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.” –Sartre, Nausea

 

When Antoine Roquentin suddenly and viscerally experiences his existence, it is felt as a soft, fluid presence, exempt from rational explanation.

 

Like Roquentin, the contact I’ve had with my inner landscape has defied the limitations of bodily experience. It has also liberated my perception of the body as a tool within a male dominated narrative that I never wrote and I don’t want to live inside of. Going in, alas, is the only way out.

 

I’ve worked as a fashion model since I was 18, and as such I’ve had an acute awareness of the limitations of flesh inside a narrative that commodifies women’s bodies. But what remains of the self when it is no longer organized around being looked at? The photos in this room are a journey towards answering that question. I want to know what it is inside (or perhaps beyond) our bodies that makes us alive, that makes us feel loved, safe, connected. The body is our home, but our relationship to it is shaped by how we use our attention; how deeply we probe our consciousness.

 

It is a courageous journey for any woman to undertake; to obliterate her self perception as something seen and instead to ask the questions “what do I see”? And “why do I see these things”?

 

I asked myself these questions many times over the last four years, always with self doubt and always with a commitment to transcend that doubt and trust the thing inside. The eye links the outer and inner, the camera is an extension of my movements between internal and external worlds. This work is a result of those questions and oscillations.

 

What I know for sure is that there is a part of the self that cannot be photographed, and photography is my way of expressing it.