EACH APPARITION SEARCHES FOR AN EYE

Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye presents a series of 100 photo-portraits made during the artist’s deployment into combat training with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Soldiers were instructed to obscure all identifying features in order to evade enemy facial-recognition systems. The resulting erasures carved into the film negatives recall nineteenth-century“spirit photography,” in which early daguerreotypists exploited long-exposure technologies to conjure spectral presences onto silver plates.

Historically, the daguerreotype’s unprecedented visual fidelity also produced the first photographic portraits of soldiers, as well as the first image of an active battlefield: a cannonball-strewn road in Sevastopol, photographed during the Crimean War in 1855. By erasing faces from her negatives, Pinchuk creates a public record that withholds identity, committing facial expression and personal markers solely to the private memory of the artist. This gesture is made in anticipation of the accelerating sophistication of region-based convolutional neural networks, operating both as an attempt to bypass surveillance systems and as a deliberate release of the images into the unstable, speculative field of twenty-first-century“operational images.”

The resulting photo-sculptural installation interrogates the phenomenology of the photograph by rearranging its core components: the unseen eye behind the lens; the passport-scale portrait sealed under glass; information veiled or withheld; the material plate; the migration of images across physical and digital infrastructures; and the process of sensitisation, whereby prolonged exposure traditionally yields greater clarity.

Paradoxically, the same facial-recognition technologies now used to track contemporary subjects are being applied retrospectively to identify unnamed sitters in early nineteenth-century soldier portraits, matching facial structures across historical archives and datasets. Against this trajectory, Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye proposes that our biotechnological condition may demand not the discovery of a sentient“ghost in the machine,” but the strategic necessity of becoming a ghost to the machine. This condition is already embodied in frontline mythologies such as the Ghost of Kyiv - an apparition that evades capture by remaining untraceable, unclassifiable, and perpetually in search of an eye through which it might, momentarily, be seen.

Installation Photography:Jess Maurer