Seven Minutes

According to the dictionary, a portrait is a description of a person’s character. I wonder if this is really possible. We see constantly hundreds of photographic portraits with which we build our own vision from individuals. We assign them attributes but not always accurately. We are just based on an image taken in hundredths of a second, in a very circumstantial point of the subject’s life.

In Seven Minutes my aim is trying to capture a tiny but complete portion of someone’s life. Subject and camera are placed face to face in a close connection, sensorial and intimate. They are set in a small, almost completely dark room, surrounded by intense sounds. They share seven minutes being able to build a more or less reliable idea of each other. For the subject, the result of this time is a variable experience created by sensations, reactance and conffesions in front of the camera. For the camera, the result is an image containing all these aspects. But photography is a limited instrument, so the reality that both subject and camera have lived will always be different from the reality transmitted to a hypothetical observer.