Distorting Reality

Selfies Inspired by Francis Bacon

Recently, I visited a Francis Bacon exhibition that left me profoundly moved. Bacon's unsettling, distorted figures, caught in moments of raw vulnerability, spoke to something deep within me. The paintings are powerful and can storm deep strong emotions. I left with my mind spinning.

His paintings, filled with blurred figures and dark, chaotic energy, led me to wonder if I could achieve a similar effect in photography and I felt compelled to experiment and try to translate those ideas using my own visual language.

This is nothing but a mere experiment, and I used myself as a model (who else could have been a better choice, I wonder?). Nonetheless, it is a humble homage to Bacon's work.

Francis Bacon, whose work dominated the mid-20th-century art world, was a master of depicting the fragility and violence embedded in the human condition. The distorted faces, suspended in motion, capture the very essence of Bacon's fascination with human imperfection. Bacon once said, "We are meat," referencing the raw physicality of human existence.

His paintings often deconstructed the human body, presenting figures in states of torment, disfigurement, and emotional intensity. Bacon’s art shares a profound truth: that the human form, and the identity housed within it, are not perfect, not stable, and certainly not singular. They are, instead, a collage of experiences, thoughts, and emotions—fragmented and fluctuating, yet deeply, irreversibly human.

The dark, monochromatic tones of the photographs were also influenced by Bacon’s minimalist, often stark contrasts and muted colours, favouring dark tones to highlight his subjects' isolation and suffering. Here I tried, by using the contrast between the dark background and the white blur of the figure, to create a haunting effect, almost as though I was being pulled into or out of some existential void, much like Bacon's figures who often seem to inhabit a space between existence and nothingness.

Like his paintings, these images play with the tension between presence and absence, clarity and dissolution. The distorted face feels like it’s being pulled in different directions—caught between multiple states of being.

These images were created using long exposure and multiple exposures—techniques that allow me to manipulate the subject in a way that reflects the fluidity and fragmentation of identity. By layering and distorting the figure, I wanted to explore the fluidity of identity—the way we’re never just one version of ourselves, but rather a series of shifting selves, a sense of disintegration that Bacon’s paintings evoke.

The blurred, overlapping faces suggest a fractured self, caught between different states of being, the tension between presence and absence, clarity and dissolution, expressing the raw, shifting nature of human existence.