“Each repetition produces a difference.” – Gilles Deleuze

What begins as an effort to reproduce the same becomes a surface upon which difference and disappearance are inscribed.

Snapshot takes shape through the repeated photocopying — 192 times — of an Instagram story that originally existed for only 24 hours. From this ephemeral digital moment, the work opens a conceptual inquiry into visual memory, spatial continuity, and the compulsion to archive.

The source is a story: fleeting, fragile, and easily lost unless interrupted by the viewer. It is saved, printed, and then relentlessly reproduced — not merely to preserve the image, but to prolong it. This impulse echoes what Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, called photography’s resistance to death.

The image originates from a university studio space, part of a decades-old system of creative education. What begins as a richly detailed visual — containing books, anatomical diagrams, color samples, and personal objects — gradually dissolves. With each photocopy, the image distorts, shifts to the right, and moves off the page. Eventually, it degenerates into a single black blot.

As Walter Benjamin noted in his reflections on aura, reproduction does not eliminate originality — it reveals transformation through time. Each copy contains traces of the previous, but is no longer the same. Similarly, Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulation suggests that reproduction doesn't merely imitate reality; it alters and replaces it.

Snapshot lingers in the tension between preservation and loss. The potential demolition or relocation of the studio adds another layer: spatial erasure not only as physical absence, but as intellectual and emotional dislocation. Archiving, in this case, is not just an act of storage — it questions what can truly be held onto.

The image gradually slips away. Each copy gestures toward the last, but also diverges from it. Eventually, nothing remains but a black imprint — no longer a representation, but a trace.

As Susan Sontag once wrote:
“A photograph is not only an image... it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”
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The work was exhibited at Mine Art Gallery/Istanbul, where the sheets were installed and replaced weekly. Each week, 36 new photocopies from the series were added, transforming the display into a process-based installation. Through these weekly changes, the work also operated as a form of performance — continuously updating itself, unfolding in time, and revisiting its own disappearance.

Site-specific installation
192 pieces, each A4
2024