Brazilian photographer Flavya Mutran is interested in the way people behave when they interact with a camera. In her project Pretérito Imperfeito de Territórios Móveis (The Past Imperfective of Mobile Territories)—inspired by her own family photo albums—she manipulates photos posted on social networking sites to create a series of ghostly yearbook-style photos“After working with home albums, online photo albums online were a natural next step,” says Mutran. “In 2005, [the social networking site] Orkut was a hit in Brazil. I was especially interested in the means of production and frenetic transmission of self-portraits getting around those environments, and I wondered if that giant image base could be promoting a dissolution of the border between private circles and the public sphere.”Her project Mobile Territories, which consists of three series THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1, BIOSHOT, and EGOSHOT, comments on the relationship between photography and the internet. In BIOSHOT, she used YearbookYourself to alter her own self-portrait 52 different ways.
In EGOSHOT, Mutran pulled portrait stills from YouTube videos that were shot frame by frame. For the series’ exhibition, she paired the photos with QR codes so that patrons could reference the videos she pulled images from right in the gallery.Mutran's work has been exhibited all over Brazil, and earned her the 11th Funarte Marc Ferrez Photography Award in 2010 in the category of Research, Experiment & Creation in Photographic Language. For more on Mutran, check out her blog and her current project.
