Ruth Webb describes ekphrasis as something that, “brings out the subject vividly before the eyes of its recipient.” Sina Boroumandi’s subject is photography, which he divides into a chemical process on the one hand, and the capture of light on the other. The series is presented in two sets of seven pictures—seven, because Boroumandi is always playing with symbols. For each pair of photographs, one is an experiment in chemistry, the other an experiment in light. With its black rectangles with rounded corners, the chemical experiment could be, at first glance, an enlarged negative. Some appear to be the result of looking through a microscope at an indiscernible shape suddenly taking on the form of a cloud, a demon, a skeleton or some other abstraction left to the viewer’s imagination. One thinks, with the almost transparent paper, of negatives, x-rays, sonograms, as if the photographer were dissecting the creative process from its most intimate source. With their aligned black rectangles, his photographs call to mind a train with time and life passing by outside its windows. And is that not what happens, ultimately, before the camera, an attempt to capture time as it unfurls?
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil de la Photographie.
