Revealing mask

1X did not select a spectacular image, but a ritual one. And within that ritual, a mask.

Far from hiding, the mask reveals. It allows us to express things differently, to embody the ancestral, to transcend time. In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Topeng summons this force: a dance theater where the body disappears to make way for figures from another age. In this photograph, the mask is not just an accessory—it is a voice.

What prompted me to trigger it wasn't so much the scene, but what overflowed from the mask: the moving hands, the painted eyes that looked without seeing, the tensions of the body, the fibers that tangled. This is where the human makes its way. Into the confusion. Into the overflow. Into what we cannot control.

Photographing a mask is like photographing an absent face. It's trying to capture what the gaze doesn't show, but what presence betrays. A thread I often pull: what remains when the visible withdraws, what speaks without words, what is embodied without a name.

This image now enters the 1X selection, alongside others that share this same quest — not for representation, but for resonance .