THIS MOMENT IS ALREADY GONE by Amir Azari
By (author): Amir Azari
Title: THIS MOMENT IS ALREADY GONE
Subtitle: Photographs Between Presence and Absence
Blurb:
"THIS MOMENT IS ALREADY GONE" is an ongoing photographic series created over the past seven months in Paris, during a period of personal and collective uncertainty shaped by distance from Iran, separation from family, and the experience of witnessing war from afar. Paris is not the subject of this work. It is the place in which these images came into being — a temporary landscape through which the photographer's changing state of mind is revealed. The people, streets and familiar structures encountered in these photographs are never presented as straightforward documents of reality. People pass and disappear. Faces remain indistinct. Buildings lose their familiar certainty. Even recognizable landmarks are transformed into something the photographer may never see in quite the same way again. Intentional Camera Movement is used here not as the subject of the work, but as a visual language — a way of allowing the act of seeing to become part of the image itself. Through movement during exposure, photography begins to approach painting: light, colour, architecture and human presence become gestures across the sensor, as though millions of pixels were being painted onto a digital canvas. The photographs exist somewhere between what is seen and what is felt, between presence and absence, reality and perception, photography and painting. Each image is fundamentally unrepeatable. The same person may never pass again. The same light will never return. The same encounter cannot be reconstructed. Most importantly, the photographer himself will not necessarily see the world in the same way tomorrow. In this sense, the work is not only about what the camera records, but about what remains of an encounter after the moment has disappeared. The photograph remains. The moment is already gone. Artist Statement: "I have always been drawn to painting, although I never considered myself capable of painting with my hands. Photography became another way of approaching that desire. In this series, the camera becomes a kind of brush. Movement during exposure allows the image to move away from the certainty of photographic representation and towards something more subjective — something closer to memory, sensation and thought. The work emerged during a particular period of my life: living in Paris while remaining emotionally connected to Iran, far from my parents, and witnessing the reality of war from a distance. I could not have made these photographs two years ago. I may not be able to make them again in two years. The streets will remain. The buildings will remain. Paris will remain. But the person looking at them will have changed. For me, this is where photography becomes philosophical. A photograph seems to preserve a moment, yet the act of photographing also confirms that the moment has passed. The subject existed in front of the camera, but by the time the image is seen, that encounter no longer exists. The series therefore explores the relationship between the photographer, the subject and the context in which they meet — and the space between reality and the way reality is perceived. These photographs are not attempts to reproduce what I saw. They are traces of how I was able to see."
ISBN: 978-87-7620-779-3
Book language: English
Binding: Perfect (PUR) binding
Publishing house: Snap Collective
Website: www.snap-collective.com
Editorial Assistant: Anna Romanovici
Designer: Elena Bidnenko
Published on: in production
Category: Art
Price (€): 89
Keywords: Fine Art Photography, Contemporary Photography, Experimental Photography, Intentional Camera Movement, ICM, Photography and Painting, Perception, Memory, Time, Absence, Presence, Impermanence, Human Presence, Movement, Identity, Displacement, Emotional Landscape, Visual Poetry, Paris, Iran