Blaze

Photobook Project, FUAM.

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Blaze is a photographic exploration of perceptual overload, urban density, and psychic withdrawal—drawing on the multiple valences of the word blaze, and Georg Simmel’s theorization of the blasé attitude in modern life. Through the lens of analog photography, the project examines how contemporary urban experience burns into vision and consciousness—at once vivid, volatile, and indistinct.

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Structured in four porous phases, Blaze reflects on how cities are absorbed through sensation, repetition, and disassociation. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the phases emerge as overlapping states of perception and matter, light and loss.

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Phase 1 — Realization: The built environment becomes dense with accumulated layers—temporal, spatial, affective. Moments overlap, streets carry residues. The city is no longer singular, but sedimented.

Phase 2 — Dissolution: Detail blurs. Colours bleed into one another. The image melts. This is a perceptual collapse—too much light, too much motion. Nothing quite settles.

Phase 3 — Humanification: Out of the blur, fragments reappear—bodies, gestures, traces. The human form emerges from the ash of abstraction, fragile and fleeting.

Phase 4 — Blaze / Blase: A double condition. Blaze as combustion, as intensity, as the afterimage of encounter. Blase as the numbing response, the psychological armor against sensory excess. This final phase holds both the fire and the fallout.

Inspired by The Metropolis and Mental Life (1908), the project echoes Simmel’s insight that urban experience demands a constant filtering of stimuli, leading to emotional detachment. Blaze is both a refusal and a record of this detachment—an effort to re-sensitize the gaze through a photographic practice attentive to time, density, and disappearance.

Keywords: space-time, layering, dissociation, urban interface, perceptual exhaustion, singularity, blaze/blase.

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For further reading: Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1908.