Unseen/Unfelt

Unseen/Unfelt is a series of digital photographs made in the Limona photo studio at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Built up as a collection of portraits over several days, the work is a sustained exploration of body and self, an attempt to photograph not only how a person appears but the part of them the camera never quite reaches.

The series was first shown as a window lightbox installation in Araki im Erotikfachgeschäft (Fotografie und Bewegtbild) at Leuchtturm Jena in 2020, a group exhibition that took its name from a photography and moving-image course of the same title at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The phrase sets Nobuyoshi Araki, the Japanese photographer whose intimate and often explicit pictures made the exposed body his lifelong subject, against the Erotikfachgeschäft, the adult shop where desire is packaged, lit, and sold. Presented in a lightbox set into a window, Unseen/Unfelt takes that frame literally: a body, illuminated, placed on display.

But where Araki's tradition insists on exposure, on the visible and the touched, these portraits withhold. The title names two absences. The figure is there to be looked at and yet remains, in some way, unseen, lit for the window and still unfelt. In a show organized around the hypervisibility of the erotic body, the series turns the other way, toward what a portrait cannot reach and does not surrender.