Photographer
Shanghai
chaherige@outlook.com
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So Close So Far is a confession; a visual story constructed using fragments of my daily life in a way that relates to modern technology and social media. I constantly feel overwhelmed by social media feeds and the hyper-connected world we live in. The covid pandemic reconstructed people’s daily routines abruptly and one of the impacts is an increasing reliance on digital technology and social media. I connect to the outside world through my screens and that makes me feel less than human and it traps me in a vicious cycle of anxiety. I feel close to others sometimes but mostly, I feel distanced.
The body of work is a conversation with myself, a self-exploration process that allows me to reflect and to confront my fragility. Through self-representation, I try to locate the issues that I have encountered and visualize them from my own perspective. The images originate from the mental pictures that occur during the conversation. Each photograph can be seen as an individual depiction and it is open to interpretation. Still images in this project are not still; they are pausing, waiting to be played in the viewers’ head. The project is presented in a non-linear way, as this reflects the modern way of obtaining information, and it is driven by emotive states of being such as anxiety, emptiness, amusement and healing. The images depict both mental and physical exhaustions through a colourful and playful visual language.
It is personal but at the same time, it is universal. It is a performance of ripping off the Band-Aid and starting to heal.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2022/apr/08/visual-noise-rankin-photography-fair-spotlight-new-talent-in-pictures
https://www.gosee.news/news/events/visual-noise-at-maryland-studio-go-see-the-next-generation-of-photography-voices-exhibit-with-rankin-59242/issue