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Iman Parvin’s “Cognition” Photography Project
Looking at the objects, regardless of their habitual appearance, is frightening. With the disappearance of words, the meaning also disappears. The words make the subject a cliché, and when we remove the names, the subject can become anything. Iman Parvin, a 24 year old photographer living in Tehran, with the help of his collection, Cognition, tells the same story.
In this collection which consists of 10 frames, he tries to think of things without words, and the meaning of the words fades for him. The collection was formed following Iman’s trip to Qeshm in 2019. When Iman was staying at a residence in the village of Tabl, he realized that his only possible friend on this island is a tourist that Iman had seen him before and remembered that he had heard from the captain that this tourist was French.
But the day that Iman met the French tourist on the island, he couldn’t come up with any words, instead he made a meaningless voice and only waved his hand to let him know that he wanted to say hi. Later it made him thinking that although there were at least three common languages for having a conversation between him and the tourist, at that moment, in particular, all the words in all these languages faded, and a meaningless gesture became their only conversation. After this trip, the half-broken chair in his studio attracted the attention of Iman. A chair that everyone had to sit “right” on or it would overturn. Thinking about the concept of sitting upright in a chair formed the main spark of this collection.
To make this series, Iman asked one of his friends named Ali, who is a theater actor, to make a scene by imagining the world in which he first encountered a chair. After sitting for a while just watching his performance, Iman started to capture the frames of his collection by giving Ali some extra poses.
According to Iman himself:
“Nothing but a white space with the natural window light could tell what I meant and I wanted my photos to speak for me.”
In general, by looking at all the frames of this collection, it can be seen that he has been successful in presenting his way of thinking through his photographs. The first frame represents the chair, as an unknown concept to the human being. The middle frames depict our challenges to cognition, and the final frame is the result of the story, a person tired of battling concepts sitting next to a chair and not on it.
Iman Parvin, who is undoubtedly one of the most talented photographers of the young generation, has always tried to create a world through photography that does not exist, and in general, his photographs are the direct product of his heart and soul, which suddenly emerge from nothing. Iman is currently working on a new project which is a big change in his photography style. We are looking forward to publishing his new collection in Persian magazine and preparing a report on it.