Manifesto for an Unfinished Photography

I do not believe in closed photographic series.
I do not believe in images permanently assigned to a single narrative.
I do not believe in the illusion of completion.

A photograph is not a full stop.
It is a fragment under tension.

I constantly return to my series.
I reopen them, dismantle them, recompose them.
Some images disappear.
Others reappear elsewhere.
What once seemed stable begins to shift.

I call this movement the Penelope Effect:
to weave and to unweave, not out of doubt, but out of fidelity to reality.
Because reality itself never stands still.

An image does not carry a single meaning, but multiple potentials of meaning.
It does not exist on its own.
It exists through what surrounds it, what it contradicts, what it awakens.

That is why a single photograph can belong to several series.
Not out of opportunism, but out of necessity.

Placed within one body of work, it speaks in one way.

Placed elsewhere, it speaks differently.
The image does not change.
Its field of forces does.

From this practice emerged the notion of the meta-series.

A meta-series is not a theoretical overlay.
It is an open architecture, a network of correspondences in which series remain porous, traversable, and recontextualizable.
Each series offers a particular entry point into the same territory of questions:
power, memory, collapse, the persistence of ideological forms, the pervasive unease of the contemporary world.

Thus, Todtnauberg, Sursis, Unheimlichkeit, Resonances are not autonomous or hermetic objects.
They are connected constellations.
Partial narratives of the same state of the world.

To refuse closure is to refuse simplification.
It is to accept that meaning is unstable, contradictory, evolving.
It is to work against photography as a finished product, and toward photography as a critical process.

In a world saturated with immediate narratives, locked messages, and consumable images, I claim incompletion as both an artistic and political position.

Photography should not reassure.
It must remain active.
Unsettled.
Available for new readings.

I do not produce series.
I construct a field of tensions.

This text stems from a question I am often asked: why do some of my photographs appear in more than one series?