Glass Diary
This project starts from the assumption that human identity is not formed in isolation, but through relationships with others. The relationship between two people is not a static structure but a process that develops through time, touches, distances, closeness, and shared experiences.
Within the space between two persons emerges something that cannot be fully attributed to either individual, a shared field of experience in which identity is shaped through the presence of the other. A relationship does not appear only as an emotional or psychological category, but as a state that has its own duration, its own materiality, and its own transformations.
The project Glass Diary was conceived as an attempt to explore such a state of relationship through photography as a process rather than only as an image.
In this sense, the project functions as a visual diary of a relationship, as a sequence of records that trace different forms of coexistence.
This photographic series explores the relational condition of subjectivity through the self-reflexive use of large-format wet plate collodion photography. Two photographers simultaneously position themselves as operators and subjects, producing nude self-portraits in front of a camera that functions without a present observer. The photographic apparatus is activated and then abandoned, displacing the conventional hierarchy between author, subject, and viewer.
Wet plate collodion has low sensitivity and requires long exposure times; the process itself intensifies the emotional experience through which the subjects pass while the image is being formed. The framing, which remains imperfect due to the absence of a “photographer controlling the composition,” also attempts to point toward the very nature of the relationship.
Rather than presenting two autonomous individuals, the images construct a field of intersubjective relations.
Because of its slowness, precision, danger, and persistence, the authors recognized each step of the process as reflective of the development of their own relationship.
The series was produced on glass plates, dimensions 23×30 cm and 13×18 cm.
Ongoing collaborative project by Milan Vlaski and Milica Macanovic.
