Seeing Off Death  

I think about the moment. The moment when the warm body turns cold. The moment when the cold earth is about to embrace your beloved. They used to say that taking a photograph captures the halo of a person. You take his picture to immortalize him, or imprison him on a piece of paper.

Farhad Fakhrian’s photograph of his father’s cold body is his father’s last presence, the moments when he is not yet beneath the soil. Here, there is both the father and a body that is no longer a father; wrapped in a cloth to be sent off with ceremony and ritual. The photographer, like a spectator, follows him to grasp and capture all these moments, but the father moves farther and farther away from him.

The moment stands still. Absence is portrayed, and this inevitability of absence is destined to always remain with the photographer. So he takes a picture, stealing the last halo, and seeing him off toward death.