Centrifugal Force
IN our early twenties, we seem to be always waiting for something to happen: graduation, work, further study, leaving one city, or returning to another place. Before these choices have fully arrived, imagined futures have already entered everyday life and settled into the body—in exhaustion, ease, hesitation, and those moments when we simply do not want to decide anything yet.
Centrifugal Force grew out of years of photographing and spending time with several friends between the ages of twenty and twenty-six. We met at university and found ourselves moving through a shared transition from campus life into adulthood. Borrowing from Victor Turner’s (1969) notion of liminality, this is an intermediary condition in which one has left behind an earlier identity without yet fully entering another. For us, however, this threshold has stretched into a prolonged way of living. On the one hand, we keep a certain distance from the lives repeatedly imagined by families and society as “stable” and “respectable” for women—becoming teachers, civil servants, or white-collar professionals. On the other, we are not always able to articulate where we actually want to go.
The camera therefore often records not events but states of suspension: waiting, resting, drifting into thought, exposing the body, speaking about desire and shame. “Centrifugal force” does not necessarily signify an escape from a center. It is closer to a bodily sensation of weightlessness produced when several possible directions of life exert their force upon the body at once.
Through photographing them, I also found it increasingly difficult to understand photography as a one-way act of looking. David MacDougall’s (2006) discussion of the “corporeal image” reminds me that the body within the frame and the body behind the camera are always present at the same time. Their hesitation alters how closely I approach; my silence and self-disclosure, in turn, affect the way they inhabit the camera’s presence. The photograph becomes a shared space-time in which we linger, test boundaries, and bring something into being together.
