The Day the Elephants Died is a series of photographs that reflects on my perspective of contemporary self-portraiture and the increasing obsession with eternal life and beauty.

It seems we have placed our lives in images with the hope of preserving them indefinitely. Our efforts to defy death and immortalize our likenesses seem to move in parallel. Every day, more and more images of ourselves are created—many of which we will never see again. What, then, remains? The satisfaction of having preserved our image? In a curious inversion of the story of Dorian Gray, what was once a curse has now become our greatest aspiration. We not only seek to preserve ourselves in images, but we also strive for those images to appear better than we do in reality. We would willingly trade our lives for the promise of a timeless, flawless selfie.

At the same time, we develop technologies such as cryogenics, pursue cures for cancer, and witness ever-increasing life expectancies. Entire communities are populated by the elderly, with little to do but bask in the sun—for what purpose?

This is the story of a person who did not value her life or her image as she was expected to, who did not fight against the world to preserve it. It is the story of someone who simply sat and awaited the end of her time—only to be met, time and again, with unexpected extensions that she was compelled to accept. This is the story of how that person chose to undo her own image, to gaze upon it with longing, just as the elderly do when they look at photographs of their youth.

The series was created using film photographs, whose positives were chemically decomposed with chlorine, then scanned and digitally printed.