Recently returned from our trip to La Palma, I recall from a memory an image of you taking a photograph of some dragon trees. The image reminds me that a camera can act as a shelter for photographers. As you look through the viewfinder, your vision is reduced to a small window. The camera has the ability to black out that which you don't want to see and focus on the beautiful: a tree, a face, a hand, a hug. Your negative records this window. As your camera searches for the familiar, your photographs illustrate the sentiment of coming home.
In becoming photographs, however, these homely scenes carry an eerie undertone. When pressing the shutter, it is as if the anxiety which the shelter aims to block out inevitably creeps into the image, like cold air under a closed door. The heimlich becomes the unheimlich. The subject of your images become doppelgangers, ghosts and alter egos; there surroundings a strange déjà vu. They remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. We all recognize small captured fragments from our own close or distant memories, but we cannot help wondering what is hidden inside their black shadows.
Consequently, we are confronted with one of the most fundamental characteristics of the photographic medium: that this is all we get. We cannot tear away the wallpaper without tearing the photograph itself. And so, I retrieve Barth's Camera Lucida back from my bookcase and find these words underlined three times: ça-a-été.
This once was. Or, in Poe's terms: this scene is nevermore. That makes the images the ultimate seducers, luring us in only to throw us back out, time and time again.
— Erien Withouck in book publication 'Shelter', Liège, BE