Brazilian laws governing photography provide almost no protection to the photographer, while making them incredibly vulnerable to legal action. The fear of legal action is pervasive among the Brazilian photographer community. But creativity rarely respects boundaries; like water it flows around obstacles while at the same time wearing them down. If you look at Brazilian photographers, they tend to work with hyper posed humans assuming almost surreal posses within their authentic spaces or in street photography that focuses much more on the evidence of humanity than on the humans themselves.
Project Spite was my own attempt to deal with this vulnerability while preserving the integrity the art I was trying to produce. I came to the conclusion that the only way to truly protect my pictures, was to destroy them myself. I tried various techniques of deformation, including: taping, origami, cutting, burning and using razor blades to destroy the faces within my photos.
I ultimately limited Project Spite to 5 photos because the energy required and transmitted to the viewer was too angry a deviation from the calm that I enjoy most in my photography. I couldn’t maintain the anger required to keep hurting my work.
AKIL STEAMSHIP 