Persona

Persona For a long time, I have been preoccupied with the question: Who am I? In Persona, I photograph individuals in their workplaces, dressed according to their professions. Their backgrounds are replaced by neutral studio-like spaces, while the colors are chosen by the sitters themselves. The masks, however, are chosen by me. Through these staged portraits, reality is not documented but reconstructed. The comic-character masks do not simply conceal identity; they reveal another layer of the self. Like children who wear masks to become the characters they imagine, the sitters wear masks in order to become, paradoxically, more fully themselves. In many societies, where profession strongly defines one’s persona, the boundary between the performed self and the so-called authentic self becomes unstable. Persona is not about revealing a single true self, but about identity as something layered, constructed, and constantly negotiated. The mask exposes the instability of identity itself.