Lucida

The Body as Light

Under ultraviolet light, the figure is no longer illuminated — it becomes the source of illumination.

Lucida is not about light. It is about a threshold. Under ultraviolet radiation, fluorescent pigments on the skin absorb invisible energy and emit visible light back into the dark. What the camera records is not a lit body but a glowing one — a body that produces its own visibility. This simple physical fact, that matter can be made to radiate, is the centre of the series. Everything else follows from it.The work marks a deliberate departure from the architectural figure work of UnNude, where hard light carves the body into form, and from the optical ruptures of Chimera, where damaged surfaces fracture it. Lucida does neither. Here the body is not a form to be documented but a surface to be activated — a screen on which light performs. The familiar anatomical landmarks dissolve into fields of colour and luminescence. Where the skin ends and the glow begins becomes impossible to say.The series draws on several visual traditions, holding them in productive tension. Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms offer one precedent: the body subsumed into pattern, the self multiplied into cosmos. Caravaggio's chiaroscuro offers another: the drama of form carved from absolute darkness by a single source of light. But Lucida pushes past both toward abstraction. Flesh becomes nebula. Skin becomes screen. The body is not illuminated — it is the illumination.Movement enters through long exposure. Bodies blur and multiply, their trajectories traced in streaks of light. These images refuse the frozen instant; they accumulate time, showing the body not as object but as event. The reference here is Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography — the nineteenth-century studies of human and animal movement — translated into a hallucinatory register where science becomes ritual, and where the trail of motion belongs to something that was half-alive and half-light.The imagery moves through mythological and ritual associations without illustrating any specific tradition. Faces become masks; bodies become icons of an invented cosmology. The fluorescent patterns transform human anatomy into something that feels ancient and futuristic at the same time — tribal markings translated into the language of neon, sacred geometry rendered in phosphorescence. What the series argues, finally, is that the body, given the right conditions, is not a solid object but a surface capable of transformation into pure light.Some of the work is made in collaboration with dancers, performers, and body artists whose training allows them to hold long-exposure poses and choreographed movement inside the frame. In those sessions, the subject is an active participant — a co-author of the gesture the camera will accumulate over the seconds the shutter is open.

Selected Works

Exhibition & Editions

Selected works from Lucida were presented in the solo exhibition Black Light at Volksbank Gallery, Heilbronn, Germany, in 2019.Archival pigment prints are released in limited editions of 5 + 1 Artist Proof on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, Baryta, and FineArt Pearl papers — the choice of paper calibrated to hold the specific chromatic intensity each image depends on. Selected works are available through Artsper, Saatchi Art, and Artmajeur. Direct inquiries: print@burakbulut.org.