There comes a moment when doing something you love stops being simply something you love. You start doing it more and more, the first results arrive, someone notices, compliments you, recognizes your talent. And before you even realize it, you start doing it for that too.
This is where Trap, the project by Clara Fortuny, a Catalan photographer we had already encountered in her world suspended between reality and imagination, begins. In Fairy Tales Fortuny, she transformed childhood fairy tales into more ambiguous, sensual, and unsettling stories. Here, she turns her gaze towards something much more everyday:
Today, it seems almost impossible to make art without showing it. You have to post, be there, take part, meet the right people, make yourself visible. If you are not constantly producing, if you are not on social media, if you are not visible enough, it feels like you are not doing enough. And, even worse, that you are not enough.
Trap is precisely about this need to constantly put yourself on display. It is no longer enough to create, you have to prove that you are creating. It is no longer enough to have a passion, you have to turn it into a visible part of your identity. You have to be there, always, because if you stop making yourself visible, you risk disappearing.
The problem is that, at first, everything seems harmless. You find something you like and want to dedicate time to it. Then the results come, and with them, other people’s approval. A like, a compliment, a publication, a new opportunity. Small confirmations that, one after another, slowly become part of the reason why you keep going.
This is where passion changes shape.
What you once did because it made you feel good becomes something that determines how you see yourself. The result becomes more important than the process, and other people’s judgment more important than the reason you started in the first place. Passion, once a space of freedom, slowly turns into a form of dependency.
Clara Fortuny’s photographs capture this transformation without needing to explain it too much. Trap is a reflection on that incredibly thin line between desire and obsession, and on how easy it is to cross it without even realizing it.
Because having a passion can make us better people. It can give us energy, make us feel complete, push us to build something that did not exist before. But when we start tying our worth to results we cannot control, that same passion can become a cage. And perhaps this is the real trap: continuing to do what we love, while forgetting why we started in the first place.
