When I woke up I had become an ant. I trailed over my parents’ body. The stench of their rotting flesh piercing my senses. My heart grew faint. ” They are dying. ” But a flash came. The roar of the rain was God’s voice. The rain had come and that which ought to die is now made alive.
Time has etched traces on the bodies of my parents. And it will continue to do so. New lines appear, soft wrinkles and little spots take shape. I had thought about documenting these ‘drawings’ that time has made on the flesh, but what would that do? Photographs may preserve for us a moment, but in the end they serve only as a reference for how much time has passed, a reminder of that which once was but is now not.
I thought it would be better to make a short story. To imagine a tale in which their bodies go through a metamorphosis. From fleshly forms to stars in the night, the moon, the earth, and the seasons of time that go on and on.
Sean Lee
Born in Singapore in 1985.
“I first picked up a camera at 18. That was seven years ago. I took to it immediately. At that time, I didn’t really stop to think why I liked it so much. Things were fairly simple then: I liked it, so I just kept doing it. It was only later that I began to discover some of the reasons of my affection for the medium. One is that photography is a medium that forces us to confront our immediate reality. It may sound strange, but at the very least, you have to be absolutely present to photograph whatever it is that you are trying to make an image of. The same cannot be said of painting, which has often been compared at length to photography. It may be perfectly possible to paint a night sky in the daytime, but not photography. You have to be there. Utterly present. This is something that appeals to me. It is also this capacity for confrontation that brings about some of photography’s most difficult questions. The privilege of being present demands a response and a responsibility. What do we do with what we’ve been given? This is something that I am still trying to find out. In spite of the difficulty posed by these questions, I still believe that confrontation has the capacity of revealing us to ourselves. On a personal level, one aim of my work in photography is so that, beyond just my making images, I can have my images make me. There’s a wish to be changed by what I do – for the better, I hope.
