videos

During the mid-2000s, I was a cinema enthusiast who had to practice taking analog photos. I decided to photograph an old European-style house in a garden near our home, which was a remnant of modernism arriving in Iran in the early 1900s. Approximately a decade later, I revisited the same street (we had already moved away), and to my surprise, the garden, the trees, and the European house were gone. In their place were towering, luxurious, and intimidating buildings that represented capitalism’s legacy in Iran. Drawing inspiration from the photographic heritage of cinema, I utilize a DSLR camera and my archive photos to explore the relationship between time, memories, mortality, and immortality that lie beneath still and moving images. Photography is in the past tense, while cinematography is always in the present tense. My goal is to return to the past and immortalize the old house using the magic of cinema and photography. I approach cinema as an experimental video, similar to its initial form, the cinematograph. Architecture is static, just like photography, while the classic clock is a moving object, similar to cinema.