Kasia Ozga

She/Her/Hers

Photoreceptors is a series of 4 larger-than-life photographs on banner. The anonymous images of the eyes of two of the oldest residents of the town of Pouzin, France, face outward from the riveted steel bridge connecting together the town, which today lies on either side of the Rhone river. The eyes look upstream and downstream, asking whose bodies represent us in public spaces and why larger-than-life billboards occupy spaces that could be used to shape a collective history.

Photoreceptors was an ephemeral intervention that intended to represent the human dimension of an industrial landscape where sources of electricity and transportation are far more dominant than individual, living, bodies.

The individuals photographed lived in the town’s retirement home and agreed to participate in the projects. Images of subjects’ eyes were cropped and printed on banners designed to fit into the bridge’s triangular trusses. Here, elderly local project participants stare out along a river that has flown in the same manner, day in and day out, from the time of their birth, to the time of their deaths. The eyes have a wistful, direct, and haunting quality; their regard does not affirm any particular vision of how mankind should live but rather meditates on the current shape of the landscape and the space it creates for human life.