The photographed myself

 The desire to be a different person goes back to the origin of the human being and its interaction with other beings, in a social community. 

Rivers of words and innumerable theories have been written about the identity of the human being, be it real, shown or perceived. 

Man is immensely fascinated and at the same time frightened by the theme of identity, and the extent of this thought is testified by countless authors such as Pirandello (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, 1926) or Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886).

All this because the atavistic, initial and definitive question that the human being asks himself, with his unique ability among living beings to self-determine ("cogito, ergo sum", I think therefore I am) and project himself into the physical world, is, "who am I?". 

With the advent of digital representation and the world wide web, the so-called virtual world was born. 

Thus, without the need to have a schizoid personality, the human being has been offered the possibility of easily redefining his own identity and of assuming multiple, at the same time, in the most authentic sublimation of the virtual and the overcoming of the real.

We are offered the possibility of living multiple lives, of managing multiple personalities and behaviors and deciding to what limit of identification to consciously push ourselves.

Cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984), Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, 1985), and even earlier Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968) have anticipated, faced and dissected this new world, in which identity is not the real one, but the one built, in a built world. 

In the same way, photography, which, already, in the analog phase had given the possibility to "play" with the real and the represented, in the digital age gives the possibility to numerous artists to tackle the theme of identity and the represented through the use of countless manipulation tools.

The limit is only the imagination in classifying one's own identity and that of others as stated by Barthes (the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am).