Loss

In 2007, thousands stood against a red wall, their faces captured with a basic 2MP camera. In these haunting transformations, a single military portrait multiplies, eyes replicating and features distorting against stark reds and turquoise glows. The standardized uniforms and regulated haircuts blur into abstraction, while camouflage patterns shift like digital ghosts.

From 2002 to 2011, the numbers accumulated with mechanical precision: 10, 31, 75, 105, 111, 146, 171, 80, 106, 167. Each figure represents not just a statistic, but a life – someone who once stood before that red wall, their future still unwritten. The series, comprising over 1000 ID photos, confronts how institutions process human loss, transforming individual stories into annual reports.

Through layered photographic techniques, these spectral images serve as both documentation and memorial. Multiple eyes stare out from fractured faces, suggesting both the multiplicity of lives lost and the dissolution of individual identity into cold data. The glowing, ethereal quality of the manipulated portraits seems to ask: how do we maintain humanity in the face of systematic loss? Each distorted image stands as a reminder of how easily we convert human lives into manageable statistics, where 167 becomes just another figure rather than 167 individual stories cut short.

The stark contrast between the mechanical, standardized nature of military identification photos and their transformation into these ghostly apparitions mirrors our own relationship with loss – how we process it, document it, and ultimately abstract it into something we can bear to comprehend.