Dysmorphia / Chimera
The fractured reflection of the self
No AI, no compositing, no multiple exposures: every distortion is a reflection caught in a single frame.
Honorable Mention, Annual Photography Awards 2024, People: Body & Nudes
In Dysmorphia, the body becomes an unstable image, stretched and bent by its own reflection. These photographs are psychological landscapes. The models stand before a bent mylar backdrop and look at themselves, and the surface returns faces and bodies they cannot see as they are. The work confronts the desire to control the body, to reshape it, to find harmony in its asymmetry. Here, beauty lies in the glitch, the moment where form dissolves into fiction.
In one photograph a woman stands in profile, still and whole, while the film beside her turns her into rippling light. Below the knees her reflection breaks into sharp silver facets. In another, her own hair blurs the edge of the frame, and the face she studies in the mylar has slipped apart: one eye drifts up toward her hairline, her mouth hangs half open, and her hand presses against a cheek that has lost its shape. The woman in front of the mirror and the woman inside it share the same warm light. Only one of them is intact.
Everyone carries two versions of the body: the one felt from the inside and the one seen in a mirror or in other people's eyes. Dysmorphia photographs the moment the two separate, when social pressure widens the gap until the reflection shows something harsher than what is there. The images make no clinical claim; they visualise an experience.
In one image the photographer's own distorted reflection appears in the foil, caught at the moment of exposure, and the line between observer and subject blurs.
The body is not fixed. The gaze is never neutral. Against a culture obsessed with symmetry and perfection, I seek to dismantle the myth of the “ideal” form. I photograph the disturbance of bodies. These images hold truths too complex for linear mirrors.
Burak Bulut Yıldırım
Dysmorphia is a sub-series of Chimera.
