GEORGIA IACOVOU

The Portrait Index

Everyone I know is immortalised as a single full-body black and white portrait, and subsequently printed, labelled and indexed by surname in a file box. Everyone is photographed in an arbitrary place and will forever be represented as they looked at the time the photograph was taken. No one is photographed more than once. If you feel that you know me and are not yet in The Index, please do not hesitate to contact me. Collecting portraits for this Index is a lot harder than collecting facebook friends. These photographs will outlive all of you. In David Foster Wallace's words:

Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigour of youth and soon our adulthood. And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and then gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-a hundred years? Two hundred?-and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here. Probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are. (Wallace, 2011, pp. 143-144)

INSTALLATION SHOT