Zuke Photography

People all around us, everyday, go through personal problems, but not everyone reacts in the same way to what happens to them. These portraits express an assortment of different emotional strengths and weaknesses. How a person deals or copes with various obstacles challenging their lives. Some might want to tell the world, why others may choose to bottle everything up not tell anyone at all. Reactions are characteristics of the human condition.

These images are square, black and white, photographic illustrations that consist of centrally posed portraits of both the male and female figure. They integrate and combine appropriated imagery of organic microscopic biologic cellular ailments of diseases and viruses, blended and interspersed throughout the photographs.

The subject-contaminating amorphous pathogens in these photographs represent various personal struggles. They do not indicate or hint at any description of the tribulations that the subjects are going through, but are visually characterizing their ordeals. A word is accompanied by each photograph to supply an indication and give insight to what emotional state the subject is feeling.

These photographs share my own personal struggles that I have dealt with and survived from in my life. At the age of 15, I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a blood cancer. Because of this disease I was under strong chemotherapy which took three years of vigorous treatment to beat. This is why I decided to use imagery of diseases and viruses, because it has been the most immense life changing event I have ever gone through.

2012