HOLY ONION is a photographic series that repeatedly captures the act of a woman peeling onions in a kitchen. What is depicted is not a special event, but a simple action performed again and again in the course of everyday life. There is no dramatic development or symbolic gesture in the frame. The action continues in a steady and uninflected manner.
The work consists of thirty five images, corresponding to a single roll of film. None of the photographs emphasizes a decisive moment. Instead, each image fragmentarily shows how a single action persists over time. In this structure, the conventional portrait format that condenses a person into a single image is deliberately avoided.
Through the accumulation of multiple images, a figure begins to emerge only in their totality. In this sense, HOLY ONION treats portraiture not as an image completed in a single frame, but as a constellation that contains time. The person is not defined through expression or symbolic markers, but appears indirectly through the repetition of an action.
By allowing an everyday act to continue without assigning it meaning, the work quietly holds open a question about how photography can apprehend a person at all.
