I am not this body . but I am. Aching and full of longing. take a picture of this meat, this husk. You don't have me. I am something that cannot be photographed, cannot be named, defined, translated. there 's experience and that's all there is.

But there's also all this stuff. It gets in the way. You have to move it around. I've always had trouble with stuff. I've fought my whole life to have control over stuff, over the appearance of stuff: my chaotic hair, learning to play the accordion, getting dressed, being on time, electric bills, the five ballet positions, getting money, spending money, even just putting one foot in front of the other. Clear the table. A place for everything in its place. A battle for order, a battle for space.

I am not this body, but this is where I live. I'm trapped in here. I eat talk take pleasure feel pain from here. If you remove me from this body I am no more.

I am certainly not this photograph. Am I? These are traces of a moment when wisps of light pass over the physical world. Is not me. Like a shadow on a cloudy day, a poor reflection in a dirty mirror, a representation that can't contain the juice. Where am I in that tiny flat substitution, that 2-D knock -off of my flesh, my self's facade? Don't be fooled. I can't keep up with my thoughts; I barely sense my self. Maybe you see something you recognize of yourself, an imprint of something familiar.

The poignancy of the mute surface of the physical world. The physical world itself so promising and comforting even in its damaged, crumbling, flooded, shining, decaying, pathetic state. We embrace its sweet dumbness in our craving to get at something real. Photography depends on light falling on or off this stuff and then pretends it's the story. But I am not this body. This is not my story. But it is.

BARBARA ESS

two inspiring artists

Barbara Ess

Arnoud Bakker

female
object
desire
satisfaction
the other
separate...


what we see in the series I am working on, is a female body translated in to forms which are abstract and we need to look at them carefully to see what they are. we see details and marks on the photographs and we might even want to take a step closer and try to figure out what they are, why they are there and what they mean. so what we are doing here is studying the pictures; pictures which will show us that the beauty of a woman is beyond the physical form.

self portrait

Paula Rae Gibson

This work is called : Is this about me or you

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith

I was looking at kiki simth and I found her work very interesting , that was a suggestion from one of the artists that was giving me a critique... it was inspiring and i got some ideas.


Kiki Smith is a feminist multi-media artist who, for the past twenty years, has explored the body from inside to outside, conflating the borders between the two, and has helped to restore the human body to a central place in contemporary art. Though western art has long been fascinated with the human body, especially the female body, the body parts she is interested are not typically found in art. She examines body functions and parts that are culturally taboo and embarrassing. Many of her works are body fragments, such as prints taken from organs or a porcelain pelvis on a pedestal. Blood, fluids, sperm, tears all appear in her works as emotionally charged elements. Her art is messy, open, uncomfortable. It is indecorous rather than polite, personal rather than official, unpredictable rather focused, meandering rather than goal oriented. Her figures bridge the gap between seductive beauty and grotesque body, open, leaking, uncontained.

He is not part of me,
but he is me, and
I am him ...


why do we always want to see everything with our eyes in order to believe in them... why can't we use our feelings?! why can't we feel everything and translate that to a new image ?!
There is a part of me that belongs to him and there is a part that belongs to her.... who is she? and who is he? It is me...

I am neither me,
nor are you you,
nor are you me
and yet,
I am me
and you are you
and yet
you are me.
I am in a state of wonder, whether I am you or you are me
By Rumi

Art is as much a response to and reflection of the larger environment around us as it is to our immediate work space.

More on Starn Twins

INTRODUCTION
Providing a point of reference that embodies both literal and symbolic meaning, Mike and Doug Starn utilize the theme of light as a central component in their work. Light, an inherent element in both vision and photography, is a simple yet powerful vector of life, knowledge and enlightenment. The Starns’ researches have spurred interconnected bodies of artworks that combine seemingly classical images of trees and leaves, branch-like angiograms, and other complex patterns that allude to the cardiovascular system and the neuronal structure of the brain.In these interpretations of flora, trees—dependent on photosynthesis and its carbon deposits—become the calligraphy of the sun and are a point of entry into the body of work called Absorption of Light, the Starns’ territory of philosophical investigations.A photograph is vision and thought written by light in its opposite. Paradoxically, black is not a void of light; black is filled with light, black is a reservoir of light: in the Starns’ conception, black illuminates.Through their innovative and conceptual layering of images of natural phenomena with those made by the most advanced scientific and medical technology, the artists establish a unique lexicon of visual metaphors. The Starns have drawn on a variety of techniques from the history of photography and the current digital age to create this body of work. By mingling the antique with the contemporary, both in subject matter and materials, the artworks are a reflection of veins flowing between many branches of knowledge.“We cannot understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we do not have a look at other fields of modern life.”This statement, made by the German art historian Alexander Dorner in the early part of the twentieth century, resonates in the work of Doug and Mike Starn. Perhaps, because they are identical twins, their existence is already a coincidence of nature decodable by science, and their art is intuitively interdisciplinary. Art and science merge when a gnarled black branch reaches for the light and our thoughts stretch to follow its lead, or the initial visual impact of a leaf magnified for inspection dissolves into delicacy: The Starns link the evident and the ephemeral. Their process is based on the idea that visual art exists as a laboratory for knowledge, both physical and philosophical. Their work serves as both a record of observation and a portal for contemplation. —JD Talasek
ESSAY
“From Imaging to Image”For many years, advancement in biological psychiatry involved innovations in molecular biochemistry and biophysics. We learned which substances potentiated which cellular events, and mapped unfathomably complex chains of reaction. We began to understand transporter theory and to trace episodes so quick that they seemed to defy our notions about time. We digitized consciousness into neural components, and specified the electrical impulses and chemical interactions involved in every process from aggression to love to the formation of memories. On the basis of these insights, new compounds were designed to treat a variety of previously intractable mental and neurological illnesses. Their novel mechanisms of action were somewhat meanly represented by formulae and theories and abbreviations and equations. What we understood surpassed our abilities of description.In the past decade, that has changed. Many of the most important developments in brain science have been in imaging. With the emergence of MRI and other advanced technologies, we have begun to chart what is happening deep and fast, things we couldn’t see with any previous methods, and this visual capacity is allowing us a fluid mastery previously inconceivable. The word “imaging” suggests photography, but in fact what an imaging mechanism provides is a great accrual of numbers, which computers put together to make visual symbols of neural activity. The image is the humanization of information too vast to absorb otherwise: if a picture is worth a thousand words, it is worth a hundred thousand numbers. With imaging, what was abstract becomes palpable; what we comprehend visually is more convincing to us than numeric sequences. Suddenly, we are looking into the brain itself while it is alive and active. Jules Verne never proposed anything more thrilling and unlikely. We can take someone’s consciousness, previously a philosophical problem, and describe what it looks like; we can subtype illnesses because we can see the difference between one and the next before we even begin noting symptoms. Our wildest explorations of outer space have never brought us more startling, informative, weird pictures than these graphic translations of magnetism and mathematics.Doug and Mike Starn have always made work that looks deep inside their subjects and addresses the status of the image both as representation of fact and as fact itself. Their photographs are not shorthand for numbers, but they are just as full of information as brain scans, vivid and explicit manifestations of the intersections between reality and ideas. Their early distressed images reflect the transience of photographic truth, which documents a reality already long gone when a print is made. This material contemplates the history of the image as well as of the subject. In more recent pictures, they have explicitly studied light, the medium and message of all photography. In some pieces (“Attracted to Light”), they examine the interaction between light and desire: moths flit towards a glow, their powdery wings refracting the brightness for the sake of which they so often give their lives.The Starns’ newest body of work (“Structure of Thought”) uses trees to express the relationship between the light that makes photographic prints and the translation of that light into life through the process of photosynthesis. In some sense, the tree is light made flesh, much as the brain scan is math made image. The physical resemblance between these depictions of trees and leaves and portrayals of the seemingly infinite branching of dendrites is striking, but the deeper parallel lies in the fact, rather than the appearance, of a functional complexity. The tree photos are not x-rays; what they show is out there to be seen by anyone. Yet they take on a diagrammatic quality and seem to elucidate the structural architecture of plants. They remind us how natural order often looks, at first glance, like chaos.The essence of the trees is a system of distribution, in which the massive trunk relies on the branches, which in turn depend on leaves; there is a symbiosis between the singular and the multiple. This process is akin in some ways to the process of cell division on which life is predicated, and, equally, to the relationship between a photographic negative and the many generations of prints that can be made from it. As we look at the Starns’ trees, we recognize how the strength of the core relies on the constant fine division of the component parts. The leaf series (“Black Pulse”) is a logical extension of the tree series: the multitudinous veins of the leaf are yet further refinements of the capillaries represented by the Rapunzel cascade of the branches. The series limns the innumerable divisions by which living things survive, demonstrating how the endless branching that we can see becomes an endless branching of what we cannot. It is as though this were a family tree, the trunk a great patriarch, the branches sons and daughters, the leaves all full of cousins.

Structure of Thought 16 (preparatory composition), 21 3/4 x 133 1/2 in., 2005. This piece is derived from an image of many cerebal neurons expressed with yellow fluorescent protein. Courtesy Dr. Karel Svoboda, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.These images resemble, also, the decision trees of game theory. Every possible choice has a variety of consequences, and every one of those has a variety of further sequellae, and so our minds from a single simple question develop an unfathomable variety of ideas; multiplicity is the shape of consciousness. Every thought generates myriad potentials, and intelligence relies on the capacity to keep all these overlapping and sometimes contradictory implications simultaneously active. If you can see the mass of the trunk and the veins of the leaves, you can achieve mental and psychological sophistication: you can contemplate outcomes and make what we call informed decisions. You can become wise. These photographs translate wisdom into a visual iconography.What should not go unnoticed in all these profound studies is beauty. We love both order and complexity, and the Starns are able to achieve a high level of both. Crowded as Brueghel, strange as Bosch, symmetrical as Leonardo, and rich as Rembrandt, these images are endlessly satisfying. Trees are lovely anyway, but here the artists have distilled that loveliness. These are not only splendid forests, but also magnificent photographs of the very structures of life.
Andrew Solomon

Diary 06

Innocence

 pure

 Water

 Fish

silence

Birth

Innocence

Pure

Water

Fish

Silence

Birth

Silence

Silence

Silence

Silence

Innocent

Fish

Pure

Water

Silent 

Birth

Silence

Silence

Silence

Innocent Fish

Pure Water

Silent Birth

Silence...

Diary 05

The more I think , the more I get confused, and I can't come up with any answers...

what is real and what is unreal? I don't know

why is it important to find out that a male and female experience life differently? I don't know, is that important at all?!! I don't know

Is that really related to my senior project? I don't know

I don't even know if I know or not!

At the same time I know, and I have all the answers to those questions.

Instead of thinking a bout everything ,I try to look at them, observe and feel them and the answers usually come by themselves.

This week I was just focusing on my body I was looking at myself , but not like always,I felt I was a new person to myself , I was going beyond the physical form and I was trying to look at my body with a new vision, as if my body has more to it than just what can be seen with the eyes. the gender is not important, in this case I happen to be a woman, so what?!

I realized that both female and male aspects are necessary in humans in order for them to be complete and balanced, as it is the same in nature. In order for that to happen one should become transparent to ones self and others , and what i mean by transparent is to break the wall between the self and the other.

The differences are not there to be questioned, but to be put together to bring harmony, to become complete, and eventually one.

That is not all!

untitled

Ditty of First Desire

In the green morning I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.

(Soul,turn orange-colored.Soul,turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.


Soul,turn orange-colored.Soul,turn the color of love.

By Federico García Lorca

darkroom print

Diary 04

Getting lost in getting lost is my way,
existence in nonexistence is my faith...
By Rumi


I was trying to find my self and I couldn't ;I couldn't because I was trying. I couldn't because I was looking at what I have always been looking at , my eyes and my mind are used to seeing everything in a certain way...
By finding I mean truly knowing who I am ....and to truly see myself as a human being. A human being that is experiencing herself in a form of a female in this life. The more I look at the physical world the more i get lost, the more I try to understand the forms the more they loos their meanings. It is time to stop understanding everything through the names, labels, and their physical appearance...
what is left is beyond the form.

These are not rocks!

I am looking at form in nature; forms that remind me of a female body. It does not have to look exactly like something , but the feeling it gives me and the connection i can make with that form as a female is important; It is as if I can relate to it.

Diary 03

27. 09. 2008
Arezoo Karoubi


I have been studying bullock's photographs. I am applying his technique and perspective in my work and I am planning to combine that with the way Starn Twins display their work. I am facing some limitations but it does not stop me from what i want to do. I am trying different ways and different languages. I am still thinking and searching for the question that was asked in the last critique. My feelings about being a female is expressing itself more and more , as i take more pictures i can understand better about what is happening around me, inside me , and outside of me, well not completely but it gives me a much clear vision.what is important is not that , what is important is that i have to keep working , keep moving and I can't stop.
But i am having fun at the same time. I am learning from my own ideas.
although sometimes i feel lost, but I know I have to find my way... there are no excuses!

bullock 02

bullock 01

WYNN BULLOCK

I have been looking at WYNN BULLOCK's work, he focuses on the relationship between man and nature. He uses the nude figure very beautifully. I am studying his work technically and conceptually to help me with my series. I am approaching my concept differently this time. Here is more information about him:


Wynn Bullock continues to be known as one of America's most innovative and experimental photographers. Bullock felt that his photographs were more than surface reflections, that they portrayed the interaction of "space and time" defined by light. This volume contains Bullock's most influential and best-known images, spanning his entire photographic career. An essay by David Fuess illuminates Bullock's life and work, drawing from a series of revealing interviews conducted with Bullock just prior to his death. Wynn Bullock devoted most of his life to exploring the natural universe and man's relationship to it; the vehicle of his search was the photograph. The penetrating, enigmatic, and almost mystical nature of his images is accomplished through formal beauty matched with provocative imagery. Bullock wanted to jolt people to new heights of visual and self-awareness by encouraging them to relate to nature directly, unencumbered by traditional modes of visual and abstract thinking. His dramatic photographs have been characterized as showing the inner essence of nature, powerfully reflecting its mysterious beauty on a level extending beyond the everyday.

Darkroom prints

Nostalgia

    
                                   

starn twins 03

More about Starn Twins

Here is more information about starn twins. what they do is very interesting and inspiring to me:


Born 1961, college-, grad school-, Boston based."We've been photographing since we were 13….." Doug.
Work-
2 in 1- the twins work as if they were 1 person (note self portrait) .
post modernism- non binary (working out side the meta narrative of photography.Destroying the Renaissance and Modernist idea of the artist as singular and all powerful creator. They know no other way.
The twins "destroy" they negatives and paper (note those)
Again they are working out side of photography's meta narrative.Exposing and alluding to process and creator(s)Morning the loss of innocence.Quote "To us art can't be diminished…"
Now the twins have been focusing their energies making sculptural photographs.
Again they are working with postmodern ideas, by making the traditional medium of photography into 3 dimensions.Contrasting humanism and science - reflected with their industrial design.For the hell of it.
Of course the twins talk about all sorts of other things in their work.
Controlled Chaos- more recent worksArt history- Raft of the MedusaJapanese culture and shintoism.
Now-
The Starn Twins are moving and shaking the art establishment right now and they seem to have a bright future ahead of them.
Short films- taped together and "aged"They still have to finish a lot of they're massive pieces.

Poetry

I will greet the sun again

I am sending my greetings to the sun,
To the tender river that filled my veins,
To the raining clouds that carried my long dreams
And to the sore aging of poplar trees in the yard:
They escorted me in all visits of dried times.

I am sending my greetings to the crowd of crows:
They always brought me the fresh perfume of nights’ crops.
And to my mother who stayed in the mirror,
And looked like my aged face.

My greetings to the earth,
The earth that the thrill of repeating me,
was cramming beneath its aroused inside,
by green seeds.

I will come, I will come,
I will arrive.

With my curls: the winged scent of the soil
With my eyes: the bright insight of the night
And I will bring all flowers I picked
from the other side of the wall.

I will come, I will come,
I will arrive.

And then the gates will be invaded by love,
And there, I will greet everybody who loves.

And, I know:
There will be a girl, still standing in front of the gates,
those soaked gates in the deluge of love…

I will greet her again as well.


By: Forough Farrokhzad

As i mentioned before poetry inspires me , and i try to read as much as i can and find similar spaces in poems that i like . So here is one of my favorite poets that inspires me with her work. Her name is Forough Farokhzad and she is Iranian.

In the Green Lake of Summer


In the green lake of summer,
lonelier than a leaf,
with my pack of olden joy,
I slowly ride to the land of void.

In the cold shore of fall,
I gave into the pale shade of pines:
This shade of fleeting loves
This shade of brief laughs
This shaking blind of life…

At nights,
while this down roof, the sad sky, is tapped
by the cold breath of a wandering breeze;

At nights,
when a wide, wounded haze is poured
in the blue lanes of our drained veins;

At nights,
at nights of our intimate meets
with bouncing vibration of our souls
a sore feel of life is heaved
only in pounds of our pulse;
an odd, ailing feel of life.

“The hopeful core of the vales is loaded by painful secrets.”
This saying is carved on firm face of peaks.
This saying is carved by whom that one night
all at once, sliced this constant silence of the mounts
by sharp echo of their truthful shouts.

“I like this calm in the lonely heart of the remains.”
A woman recited this verse,
in the green lake of summer.

A woman rhymed this chant,
with all swings of tides,
a women who occupied for a while,
that deserted deepness of the wild.

She sang:
"We poison each other
with warmth of our every word:
this toxic air of delight of life.

We are scared of the parched song of waft.
We are faded in the dark fright of doubt.

We are shaking, shaking, shaking
in daydreaming nightmare of collapse of roof
on the secret, golden garden of our love."

"Now you are with me,
Now you are with me:
Expanded, spread like fine scent of rose
in neat lanes of dawn.

Now you are with me,
intense on my chest
burning in my hands
fainting, blazing, mad,
all over my curls,
Now I am with you."

"Something,
Something massive of darkness, of shades
Confusing, unclear, vague,
like an onwards hymn of the old days
is rotating, inflating in front of my closing eyes:

I feel being spent, cornered, captured,
far from my lakes,
distant from my boat,
after the final gates…
I feel…scared."

" We had grown on this vain side of turf.
We met with that flying white knight of void,
ruling over all tads of routes."


"We are content, glad and calm.
And we are still, sad and silent.

We are content since we are indeed in love,
We are cheerless because in fact love is doomed."

By: Forough Farokhzad

Starn Twins 02

Starn Twins 01

Starn Twins

Diary 02

22. 09. 2008

I have started printing my photographs in the darkroom. this is just the start, and i was experimenting. I was trying to break the rules, and from that get different effects on my images. I am still working on that, however each time i print a photograph i know that it could be the final image, i realized that accidents are important while printing in the darkroom. I did not clean my negatives on purpose, i rather not do so. I want my pictures to look dusty, old, and timeless, and for that i will use sepia toners . I am also thinking about scanning the images , and printing them very big for the exhibition, but i also want to keep the handmade prints. i looked at Starn twins. they print their photos very big , i will post some of the images that they have. I think it is a good idea to have both manual and digital prints exhibited together.
The series i shot for this week are self portaits. but i want to take pictures of other people. so next time we will see other female figures beside myself as well as animals. I will shoot the next series by the beach, i wish i could take nude photos. this is something that is limiting me in this project.

What is also important in my work is how i stage everything. For that I started looking at movies like Big Fish directed by Tim Burton.

untitled 02

Diary 01

13.09.2008

Arezoo Karoubi

  

I was looking at artists that have similar ideas and spaces to mine.Roger Ballen and Francesca Woodman are two of them that inspire me in this series. Also as my work has a psychological explanation to it , i began to study psychological disorders. photographers are not the only artists that inspire me , i also get inspired by poems, books, music, etc...

this is a poem by Lorca that was inspiring:

Playing her parchment moon, Percosia comes along a watery path of  laurels and crystal lights. the starless silence, fleeing from her rhythmic tambourine, falls where the sea whips and sings , his night filled with silvery swarms high atop the mountain peaks the sentinels are weeping; they guard the tall white towers of the  English consulate. And gypsies of the water for their pleasure erect little castles of cnoch shells and arbors of greening pine. Playing her parchment moon Precosia comes. The wind sees her and rises, the wind that never slumbers, naked saint Christopher swells, watching the girl as he play with tongues of celestial bells on an invisible bag pipe. Gypsy, let me lift your skirt and have a look at you. Open in my ancient fingers the blue rose of your womb

untitled 01

senior project

Nostalgia

Before Started working on this project I was thinking about what I want to do. I used to think that my senior project should be something different and and special , and now that it's time has come i had no clue about how it should be different.I decided thatI just need to be myself , because my work comes from deep inside me, and I can not be any different than what I am. so here it is some of the first ideas that came to my mind.