When Tracy Emin exhibited her cum and period stained bed in ‘98, being shortlisted thus for the Turner prize, the world was shocked by the level of personal exposure that she provided her viewers with. No other work has predicted better the level of personal exposure currently at hand.
The democratization of the camera in combination with social media as the new photo album has led to new industries, new professions, new advertisement methods.
The commonplace of this experience has led to the visual normalization of peeking in someone’s life.
There is a new language, a new status quo, a brand-new industry.
Huge bucks to be made from our somewhat unexpected decision to voluntarily transfer a part of our privacy online, from voluntarily producing content for free and feeding a gigantic industry, just for the capacity to transfer ourselves into some sort of spotlight.

Eventually the curating of our own image has emerged in ways that are so close bound to marketing language that the content loses its meaning.
Seriously now, who the fuck ‘unwinds’ on the bedsheets with tea next to their toes and a book on their knees?
Our constant struggle to somehow fit our image to a perceivably more attractive one, more stylish, more sophisticated, more fit, more something anyway, reaches such lengths that our own image of our image gets distorted along the way.
You know, you are you.
The you that you are is not quite the you, you think you are.
It is not quite the you your friends think you are.
You are most certainly not the you your mother thinks you are.
You are somewhere between the you that you are, the you that you are perceived to be and the you that you actually are.

When we did the test shootings for a flat field of view we all thought everyone else was beautiful.
We all thought that we were not.
We all wished to curate somewhat the end result so that it fits to our standards or the image we have of ourselves.
We all had the tendency to edit the result, to claim that the lens was not quite, well, you know. Fix this or that, take another shooting, no this can’t be right.

When discussing a flat field of view, we had all these questions arising over and over.

Where do you stand in this?
I mean actually, literally, practically.
No matter what your feeling is on the matter. Whether it be you are a social media expert, an influencer, the last guy/girl without a Facebook or Instagram.
You are part of a statistic. A very good one, tailored to your needs.
One that knows more about you through your metadata than your most beloved ex.
Not trying to politicize here, this is just facts.

Nevertheless, your identity is not only the things that you wish to make you special.
Your identity is also the things that you ignore, you hide, you avoid, you are trying to reduce.

Michalis has a strong standpoint on these matters and thus he has created a flat field of view. The whole work will take a long time to be completed as the aim is to gather over two thousand portraits of individuals.

A flat field of view is comprised of three parts.
The brain behind it. The concept. Michalis discusses the identity today, amidst all this spectrum of beautifications and meanings attributed to it.
He comes to pose a question, really. What is the identity when you take away all other information? What is left when it’s just you, at one given moment, looking at a camera.
Where do you stand photographed among thousands, in the same way, in the same light, in the same guideline. Not because you are part of a group, a minority, anything that defines. Not because you are particularly something but because you are there, physically at a given moment. An undefined group of people.
He deals with identity at the very basis of it, the portrait. The very initial format, the ID image. His gathering does not compartmentalize, does not judge, does not choose, does not categorize, does not point out. It is not his wish to bring forward his own aesthetic but to simply set the setting and work together in finding an end result.

The eye.
The camera setting, the lens.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
The aim here is for the lens to capture the details, the landscape of the skin. To capture what is marked on the face, signs of our existence so far, the basic formal description of a face.

The model
There is an endless discussion as to who makes the artwork. From the Afghan Girl of Sharbat Gula to the Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Picasso, from the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer to the Homeless series by Lee Jeffries; the list is long and so is the debate. Michalis takes the model as a co-author of his work on every level.
He takes a stance on the matter pinpointing the value of the contribution of the model.
The photographer is not the one that knows better and promotes his own aesthetic. He is the one that defines the setting and invites you to collaborate.

What is left in a flat field then?
What is the position of one portrait, among thousands?
Hopefully, the realization that we have more things in common when stripped bare of all the things we hold sacred for our perceived image.

Margarita Tristi