UNHEIMLICHKEIT
Something had shifted, and I could not say when. The cities I passed through, the suburbs, the landscapes — they looked the same, but they no longer held. I began photographing not what was breaking, but the moment just before.
Unheimlichkeit began in the years when I was still traveling for my previous work — moving through cities, suburbs, airports, landscapes that were everywhere and nowhere at once. I was not looking for crisis. I was looking at the ordinary. And what I found there, again and again, was a texture I could not name: a present already saturated with its own fragility, a world that continued to function while quietly preparing for its own disappearance.
The word Unheimlichkeit — uncanniness, unhomeness — names that experience precisely. Not fear, not catastrophe, but the slow recognition that what seemed familiar has become strange. That the structures holding everyday life in place — social, ecological, political — are giving way beneath the surface. Günther Anders saw this decades ago: a world without humans advancing alongside humans without a world. His warnings haunt these images.
In 1947, a group of scientists created the Doomsday Clock to measure how close civilization stood to annihilation. They set it at seven minutes to midnight. Today it reads 89 seconds. The threats have multiplied — nuclear, ecological, technological — but the response has not kept pace. The COP summits follow one another in their inefficiency. The IPCC continues to call out into the desert. Nothing structurally changes.
I photographed within that paralysis. Not its spectacular manifestations, but its daily texture: an unfinished building outside Athens that could stand in any failed suburb of any metropolis; a playground at night, emptied of children; old hands on a tablecloth, holding what remains of a life; a parking lot bathed in the flat light of indifference. These are not symbols. They are facts — facts that the black-and-white image lifts from the merely particular into something that concerns all of us.
In 1947, a group of scientists created the Doomsday Clock to measure how close civilization stood to annihilation. They set it at seven minutes to midnight. Today it reads 89 seconds. The threats have multiplied — nuclear, ecological, technological — but the response has not kept pace. The COP summits follow one another in their inefficiency. The IPCC continues to call out into the desert. Nothing structurally changes.
I photographed within that paralysis. Not its spectacular manifestations, but its daily texture: an unfinished building outside Athens that could stand in any failed suburb of any metropolis; a playground at night, emptied of children; old hands on a tablecloth, holding what remains of a life; a parking lot bathed in the flat light of indifference. These are not symbols. They are facts — facts that the black-and-white image lifts from the merely particular into something that concerns all of us.
The choice of black-and-white is not aesthetic preference. It is method. As philosopher Claude Molzino has written, black-and-white disincarnates: it distances, it abstracts, it reveals what colour, with its seductive immediacy, would conceal. Colour says look where I am turned. Black-and-white says look at me — at the image as thought, as construction, as act of reading. It is the condition under which photography becomes writing — graphie — and the condition under which a philosopher could enter into dialogue with these images.
