Bree Lamb: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today, I’m very excited to discuss your lovely book The Moon Belongs to Everyone, published this year by GOST Books. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of the project?
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar: Thank you, Bree! It is an honor to share my work with the Fraction community. I immigrated to Australia just after my 30th birthday. The move was unexpected, and so I was excited to embark on a great life adventure, afterall I was going to live in “the lucky country.” I didn’t, however, anticipate how emotional it would be to move home. The reality was that it was hard to find my place in this strange landscape, and although I spoke the same language, meanings didn’t always match up, I had to relearn gestures and phrases. After some time living in a new land, I began harboring extraordinary feelings of loss - as if I had been misplaced. In hindsight I now understand I was grieving.
The project really began to take shape organically but I guess it started to coalesce somewhere in the middle of my research degree. It was the process of photographing my everyday that pushed me to further consider my personal experience of immigration. I started by making straight documentary images throughout Sydney and it was my supervisor, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, who helped me to extrapolate the feelings, sensibilities and concepts that I was subconsciously photographing. She guided me to see themes of loss and my personal search for belonging in my images. At the same time I met a lot of people in Australia who were similar to me in that they ended up there randomly or by choice – I say randomly because I really feel I was put there randomly, like a sliding doors situation – but as the project progressed, it was very much about globalization, people were more mobile than ever before, immigrating for a variety of pursuits, and the upsurge of social media brought us even closer. I was conscious of that. Many of the people that I was meeting and becoming friends with hailed from all corners of the world. We kept returning to conversations about this limbo space that we were each experiencing. Collectively we couldn’t grasp how we fit into the social landscape of either “there,” where we came from, nor “here,” the place we found ourselves.
BL: Many of the images in the book exist in a landscape or environment that could be anywhere. They are crisp and beautiful and specific, yet also ambiguous. The work is at once familiar and strange, and I wonder if you could describe the undercurrents of the work and your approach to putting together this project? Or how might your experience as the child of immigrants or you yourself being an immigrant in another country affect your approach to photography?
SAM: Yes that was intentional, I’m glad you picked up on it. Understanding how landscape functions in the formation of identity has been a main theme throughout my practice, and I think that thread stems from growing up in an immigrant household. For this particular work, I was interested in this idea that when we move home, we no longer feel tied to place. There is a peculiarity, quite literally, to the ground we walk on. When I was making the landscape photographs, I was conscious that there would be no horizon lines, that the photographs should furnish no signifiers. That compositional framework kind of went away in time, but I remained very conscious of making images that felt as though they were anywhere and nowhere at once. A sense of movement is really important in the sequence, in the process of migrating, you don’t feel settled, you always feel between spaces and I wanted that emotion to come through in the work.
BL: Could you describe your general practice? Do you conceive of a project and make the work, or make the work and realize how it functions - or maybe a combination? Has this changed for you over time?
SAM: I was just having this conversation with someone this morning, it’s a mix of both. My process begins by photographing something that I’m interested in, a question that festers, or in documenting my every day. I find myself photographing through a nebulous concept to figure it out and to try to unpack it. A certain photograph will spark an idea which I then flesh out by writing, reading books and watching films. Researching is very much part of my process, as a means to inform the way that I see and the way that I photograph and the questions that I’m asking when I’m photographing.
BL: The book is beautiful. All of the formal details combined with the sequence really bring it to life. The swiss binding combined with the medium size beckons the viewer for a more intimate read of the work. The use of black paper and silver ink is very unique – its effect is otherworldly. Can you tell us about your approach to the formal elements of the book and how you connect these decisions with the overarching conceptual interests?
SAM: I wanted the book to function like a universe in itself, so you open it and you enter this particular space – similar to watching a film, how one experiences the certain world that a film presents you. Through the formal decisions of handling the book I wanted the viewer to get that sense of motion and displacement, feeling familiar but unsure of place and environment. Also, I don’t want your eye to wander, it's important that you be enveloped by the work, that you feel a sense of being caught in this constructed land.
BL: I’d love to know about your approach to sequencing. Some of the images feel overwhelming while others feel comforting, what pace are you trying to set with the book?
SAM: You’re meant to feel comfortable and then overwhelmed, because that’s really how I felt, misplaced in a perpetual limbo state. I felt it in Australia, but I also felt it upon my return to the US. In terms of sequencing and editing, I’m very interested in the writings of the Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein. He wrote a lot about editing for film, primarily about montage and how it is the collision of images that creates meaning for the viewer. He also wrote about editing as the thread that brings about emotion in an artwork. The viewer can feel emotion through the sequence of images, in much the same way that one would when listening to a piece of music. You feel different emotions as the music moves through the arrangement or through verse. To Eisenstein, a film should move you in the way that a piece of music moves you. This idea is something that I’ve thought about a lot. I studied film at the University of Wisconsin, and one of my professors, David Bordwell, who was very influential in shaping my thinking around visual storytelling, introduced me to the work of Eisenstein and his theories have stuck with me through time. When I worked on the sequencing for this book, I was interested in whether color triggers memory, specifically how color in landscape triggers memory. I knew I wanted to utilize the color fields to allude to these ideas. At first all of the color fields were together in the center of the book. Eventually it made more sense to pull them apart throughout the sequence. Once we made that decision, it became clear to me that color should move from page to page and through each signature the way a note moves through a musical track.
BL: How did you approach integrating the black and silver images with the color images and color fields? The black paper and silver ink almost give this sense of a daguerreotype - the image comes in and out, it both recedes and comes forward. For me that decision makes complete sense with the content and the underlying conceptual interests. I don’t know if it’s coming or going.
SAM: I love that comparison to a daguerreotype Bree, how perfect, really. I first encountered GOST Books at AIPAD in NYC back in 2017. They had a book on their table, Nowhere Far, by Nicholas Hughes, and I fell in love with this book. It is printed on navy blue paper with both gold and silver ink and the book is just stunning. I knew that I wanted to use a unique pairing of ink and paper but it wasn’t until I met with Stuart Smith, the publisher of GOST, that the final form and combination came to life.
In the black and white signatures of TMBTE, I see the combination of the paper, ink, and content as a comment on fragility – these subjects are not here/not there, stable/not stable, grounded/ungrounded. Presenting the portraits on that paper is important, the individuals are perceived as existing in a transitory space. Also, I was interested in telling the story of a collective experience, so this presentation helps in experiencing the individuals as a group that exists both together and alone, everywhere and nowhere.
BL: The book is very thoughtful in bringing all of these elements together. The low key images exemplify your control of exposure and balance of light and compliment the printing process. This project resonates on many levels - physical landscapes, but also ideas of social and political landscapes, and borders and boundaries are addressed in unique and approachable ways.
SAM: Thank you. I wanted the viewer to question time and space. When it is daytime in Sydney, it is nighttime in New York, and vice versa. I wanted to play with that concept within the photographs themselves. All of the photographs are made during the day but I was utilizing natural light by finding the shafts of sunlight and experimenting with exposure using a film technique referred to as “day for night.”
The significance of the term 'immigrant' has changed drastically during the span of my lifetime. By the time I moved back to New York, the term had become very charged. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I come from a proud immigrant family, and in turn I became an immigrant as an adult. I wanted this work to speak to a universal feeling of moving home, and how much that can affect someone's emotional state regardless of borders or nationalities. To try to bring to light the understanding that through a variety of circumstances under the umbrella of moving home, whether a drastic International change or a move within one’s own country, many of us can relate to the feelings of instability and loss. Perhaps we’re all immigrants in that we’ve likely moved, picked up home at some point in our lives. What’s frightening is that we’ve taken ‘immigrant’ so far to one extreme that it’s now become a term that solely references “other.”
BL: The title speaks well to these ideas, it’s an offering or an awareness of the importance of community regardless of boundaries and labels. Thank you so much for taking the time to share insights on The Moon Belongs to Everyone. It’s a gorgeous book!
Details:
• Published March 2021
• 165 x 225 mm, 112 pages
• 32 full colour images and 25 images printed silver on uncoated black paper
• Hardback, Swiss bound
• £35.00 ($49.50)
• 978-1-910401-35-4