Vahur Puik

The series of photographs by Vahur Puik emerged in a situation where the artist rather accidentally found that he had been taking photos of his child with the child’s face invisible in the pictures, but the poses and/or activities still very characteristic. Although determined to protect his child’s privacy, Puik nevertheless decided that the photographs were Facebook material, as it were, and would even be perceived as an ironic comment on Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm.

However, the series started to expand and soon opened up a significantly broader field of problems. Is the portrait related to the face? And if so, then how? How does the parents’ desire to share pictures of their children with the public relate to the problem of a privacy deficit, which is currently relevant in society more broadly?

Finally, it seems that underlying the way the artist raises the problem is not only his parental position, but the artist’s own professional encounters with photographic archives and the storing and identification issues that surround these archives.

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