The photographs in this project were taken in Prague in December 2024 and January 2025. I had gone to spend Christmas in a town near the Czech Republic’s capital and took the opportunity to visit Prague for the first time. Once there, I was struck by the “weight and lightness” of the city, its robust buildings, the sharp-spired castle, the endless stairways, the bridge and its statues which, far from being inert blocks of stone, seemed to closely watch the endless flow of tourists who, like me, took photos, fed the birds, enjoyed a cup of mulled wine while waiting for sunset and for the lamps to be lit, setting the landscape ablaze.

I was there for only one day, photographed everything I possibly could and, when I returned to Berlin, I went through the material and began editing it. Captivated mainly by the experience of observing the relationship between humans and statues in the city, I decided to test a very old technique used in analog photography, Dodge and Burn, which consists of selectively brightening and darkening parts of the image.

Specifically, I brightened the faces, of flesh or of stone, and darkened the bodies, of flesh or of stone, applying it in an intense, amplified, almost caricatured way. I brought this analog technique into my photography and felt there was something there to explore. Yet this idea only occurred to me during the editing process, and not every image I had shot allowed for the same treatment.

So I returned to Prague in January and spent an entire day, in below-zero temperatures, photographing the statues and the people.

Luminous Ruins

So I returned to Prague in January and spent an entire day, in below-zero temperatures, photographing the statues and the people. I spent most of that freezing day on Charles Bridge. The wind chill was close to –10 °C, and I had underestimated the cold and had not gone out with appropriate gloves. Because of that, I alternated between moments photographing and moments taking refuge in a small café at the end of the bridge, where I would order a hot drink. I still do not know whether it was more to warm my body from the inside or to bring back to life the fingers that held the mug.

In those moments on the bridge, I slowly began noticing that many people were not walking alone, but in small groups led by guides who moved almost like in a procession and told the story of each statue. Whenever they spoke languages I understand, I would move closer and, even if catching the story halfway through, I learned and was surprised by what was said about those human forms made through the relation between hands, stone, metal and other materials, wrapped in a holy and divine aura.

As the editing process unfolded, dodge and burn gradually shifted from a technical procedure into a conceptual operation. I drew inspiration from the work of Pablo Inirio, a central figure in the history of Magnum Photos, yet I radicalized this procedure until I understood that what I was doing with these images was not merely manipulating exposure, but excavating the image like an archaeologist.

RAW files came to be treated as dense geological blocks, and my action in relation to them consisted of creating the conditions for scenes, which already existed virtually within the image, to emerge through a patient, manual act of scraping.

At the end of this process, in the photograph above, I was confronted by two remarkably similar faces, that of the saint, Saint Joseph, and that of a man blurred together in the inscription of their features. Despite the resemblance between these two fossil records, they are composed of distinct temporal materialities. The statue of the saint, created in 1854 by Calasanza Max Josef, is a fossil of the past. The man who was passing by is a fossil of the future. Both, however, are crystals of time in different states of consolidation.

Here, however, I was led to reflect that if human hands once contributed to the stone taking the form of cherubic figures, then geographical elevation, gravity, the cold that petrified the city, the need to maneuver around other bodies on the staircase, and the gesture of the photographer all equally contributed to the man before the camera being sculpted into this particular form.

In this project, people and statues are not approached through the relations of subject and object, living and non-living, or beings endowed with culture versus things made by culture, but rather as elements of a temporary ecology.

Through these images, I propose moving away from the paradigm of “identity” (what these bodies are) and into the field of “materialities” (how different bodies, human or not, connect and affect one another). This shift in perspective allows flesh and stone to be understood not as opposed entities, but as co-emerging formations within the same world in the making.

By darkening the bodies, my intention was to merge them, allowing them to become part of a single “material mountain.” In this sense, the man does not pass in front of the stone; he is entangled with it. Thus, I seek to look at bodies and to make photography not a “representation” or a “revelation” of something, but an event: provisional encounters of forces, durations, and materialities through which the world, even if only for a fraction of time, takes shape in this particular way.

I also emphasize that my role in this project was not to give faces to stone, since this gesture had already been carried out by the sculptors, in this specific photograph, for example, by Matěj Václav Jäckel. By darkening the bodies, including that of the human who happened to pass by, connecting them into a single mass and lightening only the faces, I attempted to provoke a perceptual displacement.

The aim was not to remove these faces from their historical or religious dimension, but to place them in dialogue with another regime of experience anchored in the presence and in the life of the matter from which the things of the world are made and in the way they relate to one another. In this sense, the photographic and philosophical gesture merely accompanied something that was already underway. The bird that lands on the statue does not recognize in it a head that leads to a face or to an identity. For the bird, the sculpture is, before anything else, a habitat, and it is also in this capacity to host and make life possible that its sacred aspect resides.

Many of the statues on Charles Bridge have survived extreme events, floods and wars. Over the course of history, however, many were gradually replaced by copies. When I was in Prague, the people crossing the bridge did not seem to care that the work before them was no longer the one from the seventeenth century, but a version produced in the twenty-first.

Perhaps because, in this context, what is at stake is not the material authenticity of the work, but the performance of the gesture. The statue neither replaces nor reproduces the original; it “performs” the role of the other stone and, in doing so, reinscribes the gesture under new material conditions. What we witness is not the persistence of a form, but repetition as difference, through which the encounter between different bodies and the bridge produces new affects.

Finally, this project turns toward these bodies, including human bodies, the bodies of the city, of stone, and the body of the photographic image itself, as active parts of a temporary ecology. Flesh and stone, in this sense, are not opposing substances, but variations of the same vital intensity. Faces, in turn, are no longer merely the identity of a subject, but an event of light, a luminous ruin. Bodies cease to be figures and become momentary configurations of matter and time. In any case, in order to make these ontological proximities perceptible, it was necessary to operate, through this project, a displacement from semiotics (what the image means) toward a physics of affects

                                                                                             (what the image, as matter, does, including what it does to us in the moment we encounter it.

The philosophical discussion developed throughout this text is broadly inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, particularly Difference and Repetition, A Thousand Plateaus (with Félix Guattari), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.