Outside — EN

These photographs register a downward gaze: remnants, packaging, and discarded fragments in their accidental positions on the street or in the grass. Like readymades, they investigate the metaphorical meaning of objects—the emotional and ideological charge that lies hidden behind everyday things in public space. The outside photographs form an essential part of the category **Pain** within the PTP framework. Produced as photographs in a 50 × 50 cm format, they are presented as still lifes that record the immediate surroundings, or as a social media post on Telegram. By focusing on the ground, the downward gaze confronts the viewer with the inevitable movement and contingency of reality, with the street functioning as a plane. This emphasis on the ground has a strong thematic link to the “ground works” within the oeuvre, which refer to graves or monuments and thus connect the most private, under-the-skin traumas to larger societal systems. The photographs constitute a visual archive of the outside world which, though public and everyday, becomes through this lens a symbol of the fragility of human existence. They show that even the most banal objects on the street are carriers of a deeper, often painful human history—witnesses to invisible social pressure and transience. The strict square format reinforces the idea of a delimited “specimen”: a cut-out in which the world is temporarily halted so it can be examined. This creates a tension between chance (the found situation) and control (the framing), as if the photographer were taking a field sample of reality. In that respect, these images connect to the broader “autopsy of reality” that recurs in the work: not to explain, but to show how meaning and emotion adhere to matter—how the world, once seen, is no longer neutral. Where the skin monochromes evoke the sensitivity of a membrane, the outside world here reveals its own public epidermis: asphalt, paving stones, grass—surfaces that bear, chafe, cut, and retain traces. The street is not a backdrop but a body: it receives pressure, temperature, friction, and produces scars in the form of stains, cracks, chewing gum, shards of glass, tape, packaging. That “ground plane” functions as a shared skin upon which individual lives cross without knowing one another. **PTP as a way of reading the image** Within PTP, Pain is not only a subject here (waste, loss, residue), but above all a **mode**: the photographs register the moment when the viewer realizes how thin the order of civilization is. This connects to thinking from the “moment” and its division into layers of experience—an unformed background (noise/unground), a supporting membrane (sensitive perception), and the object that exists within that perception. In the outside photographs, that schema becomes almost literally visible: the ground as a field of noise, the frame as a membrane, the found object as a “sign” that only gains meaning through the gaze. **Art-historical resonances** The downward gaze places the series in the tradition of the modern “found image”: from the readymade (the object that gains meaning through selection) to street photography that elevates the insignificant into a symptom. But where the classic readymade often critiques the institutional context, the emphasis here shifts toward the bodily and existential: the found object is not a joke, but a residue—a piece of evidence. In doing so, the series moves toward a poetics of traces and remains, in which the everyday is not exalted, but rather **unmasked** as a bearer of pressure, loss, and invisible events. **Metaphor (extension): bruises, but also “forensic light”** You can see these photographs as the **“bruises” of the city**. Just as a bruise on the skin testifies to an earlier blow or pressure, a photographed object on the ground testifies to invisible social pressure and painful transience—present everywhere for those willing to look down. At the same time, they are also a form of **forensic light**: not sensationalism, but precise attention. The camera functions as a cold lamp that neither judges nor heals, but does reveal that beneath everyday circulation lies a second reality: one of fault lines, residual warmth, and things thrown away too quickly to truly be over.