I have long been interested in the unstable space where the visible world begins to shift into something inward, uncertain and transformed. My work moves across photography, film and spatial perception, but its central question remains constant: how does a place enter us, and how does it continue to live within perception, memory and atmosphere long after it has been seen? I do not approach architecture, landscape or the city as fixed realities, but as fields of experience—spaces that act upon the body, shape attention, and quietly reorganize the terms of what can be felt or remembered.
For me, the image is never simply a record. It is a site of tension between what appears and what escapes, between material presence and emotional reconstruction. Through long exposure, layering, distortion and fragmentation, I try to open the image to that instability. A city may dissolve into rhythm and disorientation; a building may return as memory rather than structure; a village may appear already inhabited by its own disappearance. What interests me is less the description of place than its transformation through time, distance, affect and inner life.
Again and again, my work returns to thresholds: between movement and stillness, between clarity and blur, between intimacy and exposure, between the world as it is built and the world as it is internally experienced. These thresholds are not only visual but existential. They are places where order begins to tremble, where the familiar becomes strange, where the image ceases to confirm reality and instead reveals its fragility. In this sense, I see photography not as a means of fixing the world, but as a way of allowing it to remain open, unstable and unresolved.
The body is always present in this inquiry, even when it does not fully appear. It persists as scale, as tension, as memory, as vulnerability. Sometimes it enters the frame directly through ritual, endurance or collective intensity; at other times it is only implied in the way a space has been inhabited, abandoned or emotionally charged. I am drawn to places where human experience has left a residue—where architecture, landscape or atmosphere seem to carry traces of fear, desire, fatigue, waiting or disappearance.
More recently, this investigation has expanded toward natural elements, especially water, as a form that resists stability while holding memory, time and presence in suspension. This is not a departure from my earlier work, but a continuation of it through another register: less architectural perhaps, but no less concerned with perception, transformation and the fragile conditions of being in the world. Across all these series, I understand the image as a threshold where space becomes experience, and where experience, in turn, becomes something fleeting, layered and difficult to hold.
Marcelo von Schwartz, 2026