The Elusive Self

• Photographer
  Sylvia de Swaan
• Agency / Studio
  Sylvia de Swaan Photography

Who am I really, I ask myself as I watch my elongated shadow play on the railroad tracks along Lake Ontario; or peer into the void of an empty barrack at a former concentration camp in Ravensbruck, Germany; or look out the window of a hotel room in Denver, Colorado, waiting for the phone to ring; or at my reflection in a shattered window of an abandoned gas station on Route 49; or when I hold an I.D. picture from my childhood refugee papers against the background of post communist Eastern Europe; or kissing a long ago lover in a photo booth at a penny arcade at Sylvan Beach, NY; or of my shadow on a wall of my native city Czernowitz/Cernauti which was in Romania when I was born, but is now in Ukraine. My self-portraits are about intangible and fleeting moments of memory; mining the past, remembered dreams, interior spaces. They are about metaphor, poetry, vibration….

I'm a fine art and documentary photographer who has lived and worked in Mexico, Europe and the United States. I work on several long term projects concurrently that explore themes of memory, identity, the state of the world and the places where I live. I have traveled extensively in Eastern Europe. In 2006 and 2008 I was invited to participate in international conference and exhibition titled "IN TRANSITION: Cultural Identities in the Age of Transnational and Transcultural Flux" about refugee displacement. The first took place in Limassol, Cyprus, the second in Ekaterinburg, Russia.