Transient Surreality

• Prize
  Bronze in Special/Special Effects
• Photographer
  Richard Pilnick, United Kingdom
• Date of Photograph
  2024-2026
• Studio
  Richard Pilnick Ltd
• Website
  https://www.richardpilnick.com
• Instagram
  https://www.instagram.com/richardpilnick/

A hotel room belongs to no one and everyone, a space forever hosting the temporary, forever witnessing departure. Transient Surreality uses this threshold as a meditation on consciousness, identity & impermanence. Each room holding a residual trace of those who came before, a dream that never was, while the current occupant unknowingly leaves their trace for the next. The recurring figure in a bathrobe, deliberately anonymous, becomes both subject and cipher, identity flattened so something more personal can emerge. Objects suspended in flight, sheets that rise: the unconscious made visible.

Richard Pilnick works with photography as a way of seeing, not only the world in front of the lens, but the interior landscape we carry within. His portraits and studies of people are less about capturing an image and more about entering a conversation: a threshold between self and other.

Over twenty-five years he has photographed across four continents, from mountain communities in the Himalayas to concrete plants in Luxembourg, from hotel rooms in Vienna and San Francisco to fishing villages in southern India.