As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011

Looking at the work of Reza Aramesh, one inevitably thinks that all styles and approaches to documentary photography have radically changed in relationship with the arts and other media. Aramesh’s perfectly executed translations of images taken from the news, merge the opposite ends of the photographic spectrum, reportage and staged photography, illuminating both his subjects and practice. The erasure of arms, and often of those who bear them, renders pictures emblematic, suspended in space and time. Only by reading the titles you actually understand what they stand for. Blurring the boundaries between the most immediate, urgent form of photography and its most constructed counterpart, Aramesh questions the status of both. He reflects on conflicts of meaning, by recreating those among humans. To consider documentary photography as a form of art adds to its significance, and claim as witness to the multiple realities of those who are observed and observe. Pushing the viewer towards a better understanding and towards, possibly, truth, momentary or partial as it might be. The invasion of the media is part of our lives and we know too well that they are devices to create realities rather than to record them. Photography is a protagonist in this comedy of errors.

Aramesh’s Between the Eye and the Object Falls a Shadow… – a title inspired by The Burroughs File of William S. Burroughs – is part of his Actions series. It uses the narrative of Western History, its representations and conflicts, as a point of departure, and by re-contextualizing acts of aggression, it turns our attention away from the description of warfare. Highlighting mechanisms of subjection and submission, it underlines all the suffering human minds are able to inflict and endorse. And the ways we try not to think about it.