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Eye Confronting Eye

Mina Iranpour

Isfahan, Iran, 2013

Photography, in its turn, can be considered the pictorial and external world of the artist. This is what compels the artist to endow a new order to the fragments of the dominant and general order of his/her surroundings. Therefore, writing about the process in which the photographer-artist eternalizes a specific moment seems a very difficult task. But one may be able to leave to the words the dominant spirit and the absent truth of images and that hidden power—which turns to a pleasurable aspect the composition of light, and color and form and content—by referring to one’s self. Certainly, that pure picture is based on its open and pure presentation in front of the audience’s eyes; the rest are embellishments or accessories which the convention of “location” of the integration of the images and the audience demands.

In the simplest, and at the same time, the profoundest definition, photography can be determined as the immortalization of a swiftly flying moment. It is the reality which is built or, in other words, a presence whose absence—or say whose death—of elements is eternally represented. In a more personal or honest sense, it may be confirmed that photography is a simple playing game with the camera. In the midst of the mire of words and drowning in the pitfall of apocryphal pictures, photography is a secluded corner of childhood: it is a pleasurable silence and a silent pleasure, a kind of spite and a sort of movement against the linear events of life. It is a vacant space to be filled out; it is a blank palette for painting; it is a look at specific to the general and a glimpse at the minute to the whole. It is the novel and plain union of fragments, which are lost in the crowd, in a framework. These pieces distance from their true identity and are redefined. To this feast of association and new identification, the audience and spectators are invited, eye in eye. This is the process, whose absence in the present tragically industrialized world and era is probably the mystery of fragmentation and disintegration of mankind.

But what does the photographer do with the pictures? Or, in other words, what does the camera do to the photographer?! Is the camera a mechanical eye, which sees, under the command of the photographer, whatever the photographer’s eye is unable to perceive? Is the photographer after an escaping truth, which even for a moment, can be trapped or captured and then the photographer could explore its layers, find something, or fail to discover anything; then start hunting again? Is the camera supposed to mercilessly invade the reality and analyze all its elements into lines, black and white light, color and...? And does the camera mysteriously dance in the feast of dancing colors and shades?

The game continues and only the definitions are replaced. What is important is an empty corner void of any temporal and spatial generality for referring to the self; it is an open and intimate conversation with these mysterious fragments of internal reflection.

My pictures sometimes turn into poetry,
My poems convert to painting
With the moderate music of the wind and
The dance of the color,
So that I frame the moments and
Write the footprints of the light
In the shades of the afternoon.

Mina Iranpour was born in 1963 in the city of Isfahan. She has been fond of photography since her childhood; she used to buy a camera with her first saving and started to shoot pictures from any subject.
She started photography in 2009. She is usually a travel-photographer, the travels she has taken to different places in Iran or to Europe.

She lived with this love for photography, until the nostalgia of this memory re-motivated her later, to have a more serious look at photography.

Her success in photography became a turning point in her life: she has attended in ten Caroun club’s group exhibitions. Currently, her individual exhibition is in progress at Caroun gallery. This exhibition is free of charge for all the visitors; she is the first prize winner of last year contest of Caroun photo club.


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