Seung-Hwan Oh, alias TONIO’s photographic work delves into the gradual disappearance of the image. In a world saturated with visual representations, he deliberately alters them, allowing them to vanish. In his series Impermanence, he uses a unique process: cultivating microbes that are applied to photographic film, leading to the slow decay of the image. The result is haunting: portraits partially erased, corroded by time and matter, evoking the fragility of memory and human existence.
This project, developed over nearly a decade, resists total control. Rather than technical mastery, Oh embraces poetic surrender to chaos, rendering the faces vulnerable and moving. The comparison with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is striking: like Dorian’s portrait, these photographs are archives of time, disfigured by their own duration.
Oh’s work also resonates with the tradition of European vanitas painting, offering a modern meditation on impermanence. Like still lifes of the past, his decaying portraits remind us of life’s transience. They echo Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography as a trace of the past, laden with absence and mourning. By breaking down the image, Oh challenges its sacred status and confronts us with our own mortality.