«Self-Portrait is a series of photographs of Ahn on or near the top of skyscrapers, often leaning from a window or seated on a ledge. Some are taken from a first-person perspective, showing her legs dangling into space as she looks down. The project stemmed from a photograph of her feet she took while sitting on the edge of an apartment building while a student at Pratt, and has continued since then. The bulk of the photographs are from New York and Seoul, with some from Hong Kong.
For these photographs, Ahn works by gaining access to the building legitimately — it can take several months for the owners to give permission for the project — and setting a digital camera to take a large volume of high-speed images while she poses. These are then sifted to find a picture depicting Ahn looking unconcerned or distracted, captured in what she describes as «…a certain moment of time that did exist, but which we couldn’t perceive with the naked eye because it happened too fast.»
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