Thirty days, thirty square-format photographs rimmed in black with no apparent logic: some urban and industrial views, a wind farm, the tomb of an English mercenary, a lost tractor, a stuffed tiger.
“It took me thirty days to capture thirty images to depict my distress. I tried to surrender to the anguish of my mind and to create illogical images, contrary to my usual practice. I tried to be “all over the place” and the result is a symbolic or rather iconic dispersion”.
To depict this everyday anxiety, Aliyar Rasti used an everyday device: his telephone. The choice of the number thirty gives the series a set time frame. Rasti prefers facts: thirty days, not a month. He dissects this anxiety by enumerating it rather than relying on abstract emotion. The anxiety is the all-consuming urbanization ravaging daily life with the carelessness of a game of dominos, a society where the need for energy replaces trees with metal giants, the flags flying in the streets to remind everyone of the ubiquity of power, the hopes of an unknown future, standing upright like a ladder reaching towards the sky alone, and the loneliness of an empty stadium.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil de la Photographie.
