A solo photography exhibition, ‘Borderless’ by Mahdyar Jamshidi, a young artist, is underway at Tehran’s Mah Art Gallery.
The show includes 22 photos inspired by the traditional form of Japanese poetry Haiku, Honaronline reported.
“I tried to illustrate the mood of Haiku in my photos; in other words I wrote poems with my camera,” Jamshidi said, adding that the collection “is focused on silence, making the flowing emotions in the subjects tangible.”
He started working on the collection five years ago when he visited the Philippines, Australia and Indonesia. The series are in three parts, ‘Sky’, ‘Loneliness’ and ‘Love’. “Positive and negative moods ‘take over each other’ in the photos, distinguishing between the two kinds of emotions.”
Haiku is about being simple in view and thought, so the photos are more inclined toward minimalism. Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts.
Jamshidi said his love of nature is the reason why he chose Haiku as the source of inspiration to his work. “The strong presence of nature in Persian poems and my special interest in it, elicited my interest in Haiku.”
Photo Book
The gallery showcases only a small part of Jamshidi’s photo series. The complete collection will soon be published as a 100-page photo book including Haiku by Japanese poets, he said.
Haiku is a brief form of poetry, typically represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a cutting word between them, a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colors, the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.
While modern Japanese Haiku is increasingly unlikely to follow tradition or take nature as the subject, however, the use of juxtaposition continues to be honored in both traditional and modern Haiku. There is a common perception that the images juxtaposed must be directly observed everyday objects or occurrences.
In Japanese, Haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line while in English they often appear in three lines.
The exhibition ‘will run through July 7 at the gallery, at No. 26, Golestan Blvd, Africa Avenue.
