Mirjana Vrbaski

Verses of Emptiness is the sole project I have been focusing on since 2008 until present. What interests me in this series of portraits and in photography in general is finding a way to capture our infinite ambiguity and complexity in something as seemingly simple and straightforward as a human face. To do this, I reduce as much as I possibly can in an image without falling into abstraction. I eliminate everything I think makes it easy for the viewer to ‘read’ the image: context, visual codes, signs of belonging to a group, genre or a type of a person, explicit expressions. I chip away at my sitters’ ‘outer’ classifiable layers, sculpting them inwards until I reach what I think is a more honest, original layer. Until, in a sense, a person becomes hollow enough to echo another. And an anonymous sitter becomes an icon…familiar yet unspecific, and absorbed in a quiet, meditative calm.

The title Verses of Emptiness refers to the Eastern belief that emptiness generates the most potential for meaning.