From Eye To Bone - Bartosz Wajer in FIGURES Photography Magazine

From Eye To Bone is based on photographs found in online erotic image databases—images that explore nudity while simultaneously arousing desire, acting as archetypal representations of the object of longing.

Artist : Bartosz Wajer

Series : From Eye To Bone

Website / Instagram (artist) / Instagram (project)

I put a great deal of effort into pushing the camera to do what it was never originally designed to do—for instance, creating photographs using only lenses and found images from the internet. The process involved re-photographing photographs with a digital camera stripped of its lens. The resulting noise and blur are effects achieved through carefully obscuring the sensor with hands and lenses.

The optical reproduction I use is a specific kind of transposition—a repurposing of something for an entirely different use than originally intended. Into the world of sharp, well-lit images intrudes a sudden flare, destruction, fragmentation, bodily strangeness. The side effects of the lens cause peculiar distortions, interferences, warping, and spatial disruption.

What fascinates me is how photography can shift in such a way—not merely representing the world, but actively concealing it through blur and obscurity. I’m captivated by the distortions and beauty of images produced with the camera as an opposition to realism.

People tend to assume that the world looks like a photograph. But photography is governed by optics—by the rules of geometry—whereas the human eye and brain perceive the world in a completely different way, often shaped by psychological principles.

There’s something in that discrepancy that moves me deeply: the belief that the true face of reality remains fundamentally elusive.

Bartosz Flak, curator of the Museum of Photography in Krakow (MuFo), Bartosz Flak, wrote:

We must acknowledge eroticism as a movement of being within us.
Eroticism is first of all the most moving of realities; but it is nonetheless, at the same time, the most ignoble. — Georges Bataille

Bartosz Wajer’s works in the From Eye to Bone series are photographs from erotic portals that are rephotographed without the standard use of a lens, the artist instead employing the exposed matrix of a digital camera, a handheld lens, and manual manipulation. Utilising the equipment against the rules of ‘proper’ photography seems to be a cognitively effective technique. By stripping erotic content of the conventions of titillating imagery, one discovers its comic and, at the same time, disturbing nature.

Movement is the grammar of these photographs. The object of desire existing in external space correlates to an inner need. The eye and the hand tremble at the thought of the image that penetrates the viewer’s body, moving from the outside world through one’s innermost dense matter—from eye to bone—to the source of pain and pleasure. Images of bodies are corporeally experienced. Like a sweet, harmless poison, they trigger chills, flushed cheeks, excessive sweating.

This isn’t the world of lucid photography. These pictures belong to the realm of the night, a land of ephemerality in which the corner of the desk, melting into the shadows, becomes itself a shadow, an armchair, a lamp, and the monster under the bed. Here, the sensual object of desire is also something out of a bad dream.