Emkan

Artists: Milad Hosseinzadeh, Ali Saffari, and Hamed Shafiee

The experience of seeing and seeing anew is the basis of these photographs. These pictures fall somewhere between making and taking. Neither is everything prearranged nor does the photographer entirely give way to chance. Even though all the photographs somehow lean toward abstraction, they do not want to be entrapped in a “non-image;” we can see the shimmering of shapes and forms in photographs. Hamed Shafie enjoys the still-life genre; through light, shadow, glass, and image reflections he suspends the physicality of the objects. By staging the scene, he orchestrates the death of objects. With his photographs, Milad Hosseinzadeh tries to capture the hazy images preceding or succeeding the very moment he falls asleep; the images which ephemerally manifest in his mind and vision but are never frozen: they melt and slip. Ali Saffari, more than the other two photographers, I would say, is attached to the abstracted image. Interestingly, the optical tools which are supposed to make the pictures, are themselves the subject and eventually obliterate the images. His photographs bond the science and art of photography. They tie the rise of photography to its present.

Each picture distinctively asks me if photography is the art of realism or if the reality of photography is something else. With no clear answer, I look at and enjoy these insights and images.

Ghazaleh Hedayat