Echo in Profile

I’ve always been obsessed with profiles.

Not the ones you scroll through — the real ones.

Side views. Slanted glances. The shape of a face right before it turns away.

There’s something vulnerable about the profile — something unfinished. Like the person is mid-thought, mid-leaving, or mid-disappearing. And maybe that’s why I made this new piece: Echo in Profile.

The figure in this work is just barely there. They’re standing in front of a mirror, but the reflection gives nothing back. No clarity. No symmetry. Just digital noise and soft blur where their features should be. I blurred the face using a face blur tool — first automatically, then manually adjusting the distortion to make the mouth vanish more than the eyes. It needed to feel quiet. Dissolved. Tired of being seen.

The idea was simple. The execution wasn’t.

Because sometimes the hardest part of making a faceless portrait is deciding how much to leave behind.

I wanted this person to feel like an echo. Like someone trying to find their shape again but refusing to fully form. The lack of reflection wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice. A refusal to return the gaze.

Blurred identity, to me, isn’t just about privacy.

It’s about power.

It’s about editing your presence before the world does it for you.

With Echo in Profile, I let the figure stand still. Not hiding. Not confronting. Just existing, faintly. Silently.

That’s the kind of visibility I’m interested in right now.