SEQUENCE 01

My practice began to take shape around 2002, while I was still a student, through research into war photography, particularly images of the Iran–Iraq War. Part of this research involved comparing official and independent photography: looking at how the same subject could be produced and seen differently within different systems of image-making, and how those differences might relate to the photographer’s position, institutional structures, and ideological context.

This research continued between 2002 and 2008. I spoke with independent photographers as well as photographers working within state institutions, and gained access to archives that were not normally open to the public. Across these images, questions of violence, the physical consequences of war, and the ideological organization of the image were constantly present. Photographs of wounded bodies, corpses, or the direct effects of war were not necessarily excluded; these images could themselves participate in the construction of an ideological narrative.

This experience made me think of the archive not as a neutral collection of documents, but as a system that preserves, selects, classifies, and gives meaning to images. At the same time, something always remains in an image that cannot be fully controlled. Ideology can organize an image, but the image never completely dissolves into ideology.

During the same period, the internet became increasingly important to the way I worked. It quickly became more than a source of images. I experienced it almost as a landscape: an open field of data and images where war, bodies, cities, animals, everyday objects, news photographs, amateur images, fabricated images, and images of uncertain origin could appear almost simultaneously beside one another.

There was a connection between this condition and my experience of the archive. The war archives I had been researching were restricted, classified, and controlled; the internet was open, dispersed, and constantly changing. But in both cases, what interested me was not simply looking at images. I was interested in how an image is produced, circulated, selected, and read again within a much larger field of information.

At first, this led me toward physical reconstructions. An image encountered online could become a small scene, a figure, or a provisional construction, then be photographed again and return as another image. With each transition, some information disappeared while something else was produced.

Alongside this, direct-flash photography became another important part of my practice. In Cholesterol LDL (2006), I worked quickly, usually photographing people, objects, rooms, and situations around me with direct flash.

Flash gave me several things at once: the possibility of photographing almost instantly in low light, without preparing the lighting or staging the scene; a raw and slightly anti-aesthetic quality; and, most importantly, a large amount of visual information recorded in a fraction of a second.

At night or in interior spaces, parts of a scene could become fully visible only at the moment the flash went off. My control over the surface of the image was therefore never complete. Details, reflections, surfaces, objects, and things that were not necessarily at the center of my attention could suddenly acquire a strong presence in the photograph.

What interested me was precisely this excess of information, partly outside my control, that flash introduced into the image. In that sense, this way of working was connected to the larger question that had already emerged through the archive and the internet: what information an image is made from, what enters it, and what remains beyond the control of the person producing it.

By 2008, this interest in the accumulation of visual information had begun to move toward an act of subtraction. Just as flash could suddenly reveal a large amount of information, it could also blow out parts of an image, flatten them, or make certain information disappear. That relationship between an excess of information and its loss became increasingly important to me.

I gradually felt that photography alone was no longer enough for what I wanted to do, and that I needed to manipulate the photographic image more directly. In Recreational Area (2008), this developed into a digital process. The images came from different sources and categories — material found online, news and amateur images, fabricated images, as well as photographs I had made myself — and I began removing parts of their visual information.

Colour, texture, depth, and details that seemed excessive were reduced until the image was left with simpler lines, surfaces, and elements. For me, this was not simply about developing a graphic language. It was a way of examining an image through the reduction of information — something close to what I would later describe as visual deduction.

Each of the nine images in Recreational Area deals with a different situation, but when they are placed together, a broader logic begins to emerge from these different categories. A game, a medical environment, a wall, consumer objects, or a robot can be removed from their original contexts and brought into a shared visual structure. The relationship between them does not need to be narrative or direct; the work takes shape through the way these different situations and categories accumulate, are reduced, and are reorganized.

Looking back, I also understand Recreational Area as part of an early post-internet approach in my work — not because the internet itself was the subject, but because existing and circulating images had become material: something that could be extracted from one context, manipulated, reduced, and reactivated within another.

This process of subtraction and digital reworking later became an important foundation for Capital, where this visual language expanded beyond a single photograph or a limited group of images into a broader structure involving the city, images, and information.