Solaris 

film photography/ lit print 
 2012 

 This project began with a simple, almost childish question: what if Solaris is not there, light—years away, but here? Underfoot? In the glare of a puddle by the house? I didn’t want to illustrate Lem or Tarkovsky, but to find a gap in the familiar. I armed myself with unusual lenses — a monocle and tilt-shift. The monocle blurred the edges, turning the bench into a ghostly island. Tilt-shift flattened the perspective, making the field outside the city look like a miniature, strangely tense model. The light that filtered through the imperfect glass painted halos and highlights — not defects, but traces of reality rubbing against optics. Each frame was an attempt to shift the fulcrum. Not to show the “beautiful strange”, but to provoke the question: what do we really see when we look at the yard, the road, the wasteland? Maybe this is our “planet” — a territory where the contours of something else, personal, forgotten, appear through the ordinary? The key was the final lit print for some of the shots. This capricious, hand-made print didn’t just reproduce the image. She was materializing that “tremor.” The paper absorbed the silver, enhancing the contrasts, deepening the shadows, making the highlights almost blind spots. Each impression became a unique impression of the moment of the shift — not a digital simulacrum, but a physical proof of the meeting of light, glass, chemistry and that elusive something else that hides behind the shape. This is not an answer to the question of essence. This is an invitation to take a closer look at the thrill of one’s own perception.