The Refraction of Light

For me looking at the photographs of Shirana Shahbazi is often accompanied by a kind of struggle with layers. It seems to me that the way the views are assembled in this image and the way angles and dimensions are stacked upon one another can function as an alphabet—an alphabet that helps us become more familiar with the visual language she employs in her work.

The surface of the ground—perhaps the floor of a room—has been photographed repeatedly from different angles. That surface is multiplied across several photographs and those same photographs are then layered upon one another to fill the surface of a final image. The clues to how this repetition operate can be found in the flashes of light, while the shifts in color tones reveal its boundaries. The photograph seems to be attempting to break through its own two-dimensional surface even if that rupture is ultimately an illusion.

The surface appears to slope, yet I suspect that this, too, is deceptive—a product of perspective. This detail reminds me of a childhood memory. At a time when my visual memory was less conditioned; I would spend much of my days wandering aimlessly and I would discover something curious. While I was walking through my grandmother’s house I would hold a large mirror above my head and tilt it forward so that it would reflect the path ahead of me, the floor before my feet would transform into a downhill slope—at least within the mirror. I would then begin running across that inclined ground, a slope that did not actually exist in my grandmother’s house.

This photograph awakens in me the excitement produced by that contradiction: the contradiction between what I saw and what I physically experienced. It recalls the memory of a descent that existed only in the image reflected by the mirror.