When have you felt the most helpless in your life?

 Mia Unverzagt creates portraits of people she doesn’t know as they reveal intimate feelings and stories to her. The results are series of portraits, each series done under the same conditions in the same small shop or container. She asks the people, who dress entirely in clothes of one particular color for each of the series, to allow her to photograph them while they recall, generally in narrative form, a particular emotion.

The work is about remembering, about dealing with your own story, about narrating emotions, about hurting. Part of the agreement was that the artist would not report any of the content that she heard – we can only guess and try to read people’s faces. 

The reduction of external artifacts produces a great sense of calm.  And we concern ourselves with our thoughts about the questions, for the faces of the people being portrayed speak to us only if we ourselves give answers. Here the portraits of others become our portraits; we can only supply our own stories to take the place of the stories that we are not permitted to hear.