Anca Teke

It started with light. A glimpse of it on a floor, a wall. The way it landed on my hand, on my heel.

Origin

I had my phone, and I started shooting. Not because I had a plan, but because something in that light was too alive to let pass. I was almost always in heels. Not as a deliberate choice, but because they are simply part of who I am. An extension of me. And through them, I found a way of seeing that was entirely my own.

A heel is not just an object. It depends entirely on how you look at it, how you give it life. For me it carries something deeper. It is part of what makes a person individual. The way it meets the floor. The angle it creates. The shadow it throws. In the right light, it says more about a woman than her face ever could.

I have always had an eye for what is small, what is specific. My tendency is to notice the little things first, before the big picture, before the obvious. Not the whole, but the detail. The things most people walk past. The strap. The shadow. The precise line where skin meets leather. The things that are easy to ignore, which is exactly why they interest me.

Like many women, I was on a journey of recognition. Of discovering what I actually look like, not through the eyes of others, but through my own. Self-portraiture became the tool for that. Not performance. Not provocation. Presence.

There is a conversation that has existed for centuries about the female body and who gets to look at it, who gets to frame it, who gets to decide what it means. I am not interested in that conversation as an argument. I am interested in it as a practice. In choosing, for myself, what I show and how I show it. In understanding that a woman is not an object to be seen. A woman is art.

But many of us, in moments of incompleteness, believe that showing is our strength. I believe the opposite. It took time, real time, to love myself enough to arrive at a place of fullness. A place where, if I choose to capture something, I do it from awareness. Not from need. Not to be seen.

That shift changes everything about how I work. I am no longer looking for something to prove. I am simply present with what is in front of me, attentive to it, curious about it. What I seek in every image is truth. The vulnerability that most people mistake for weakness. I have come to understand that vulnerability, chosen and conscious, is the only real strength there is.

I am the eye and the subject. The camera, the light, the body. All one.

But I do not intend to stay here. For me, stillness is closure, and I was not made for that. This work began with self-portraiture because it was the most honest place to start. The eye that learned to see in a glimpse of light on a floor is the same eye that wants to turn outward. To find that same truth in other people, other bodies, other moments of presence. The work will grow. It always does, when you follow what you are genuinely curious about.

Anca Teke IamTeke