An Intimate Improvisation

The kitchen is simple and unpretentious, and the people are familiar and close. This very comfort and closeness become the subject of the photograph and fit into the random logic of photography. There is no lofty or aesthetic choice here; as Charlotte Cotton says, “It is an uneventful subject.”^* An ordinary, everyday matter in the true sense of the word: a “lifeworld” that is always taken for granted, with nothing extraordinary to distinguish it. What is utterly trivial and commonplace gains subjecthood in the rapid passage of time; in the moment the door opens or closes, alongside the stretched bodies in motion. This moment in the photograph is neither “definitive” nor fateful, but it is expressive and temporal — both qualities inherent to the nature of photography. The very nature of selection that frames this improvisation and makes it worth watching.

The picture, with its spontaneous qualities, just like the food on the table, targets the hurried pace of life in its contemporary form, bearing no relation to slowness or pause. Yet, in this rapid transition, my gaze stubbornly fixes on the toes of that woman, which have remained still in the flash passage of a fleeting moment.

^*Cotten, Charlotte. Photography as Contemporary Art. Translated by Kiarang Alaei, First Edition, 2020, Herfeh-Honarmand.