Peeled is a staged photographic series that explores the quiet violence of consumption, gendered desire, and the performance of power. Through carefully composed still life imagery, I use symbolic objects, bananas, satin gloves, silverware, and red velvet curtains to evoke a theatrical yet unsettling narrative. The series confronts the viewer with a stylized ritual, where the body is abstracted, dissected, and ultimately consumed.

In this work, the banana becomes more than a fruit. It is a stand-in for the body feminized, sexualized, and stripped of agency. Its gradual transformation from whole, peeled, sliced, and vanished reflects how identity and presence can be reduced to fragments for the sake of visual or cultural pleasure. The satin glove plays the role of the performer or puppeteer. It does not touch with intimacy, but rather with detached elegance, reinforcing themes of control and objectification.

The red curtain and focused lighting deliberately reference performance spaces, stages, peep shows, or rituals. They create a voyeuristic atmosphere that implicates the viewer as a participant in the act. Who is holding the knife and fork? Who is watching, and who is being watched? These questions are central to the work’s meaning.

Although the series may at first appear playful or absurd, I intend for it to provoke discomfort. Beneath the humor lies critique: how desire becomes performance, how femininity is stylized for consumption, and how the body can be presented not as a person, but as a symbol to be consumed, judged, or erased.

I see photography as a tool to expose systems we often accept without question. Peeled is a reflection on how everyday images, especially those tied to food, sex, and power, shape our understanding of bodies and their worth. By blurring the lines between still life and portraiture, between object and subject, I invite viewers to reconsider our roles in the cycle of looking and being looked at.

In Peeled, I blur the boundary between still life and portraiture, body and object, consumer and consumed. I believe photography is not just about capturing what we see it is about making visible the systems we take for granted. Through symbolic arrangements, minimalist settings, and deliberate repetition, I aim to speak about the roles we play and the rituals we perform, often unconsciously, in our daily lives.

Ultimately, this series is a reflection on power and intimacy, on performance and vulnerability, and on how easily a body can be stripped of meaning when reduced to a symbol. Peeled is an invitation to look closer and question what we’ve been trained to see as usual.