For modern man, his confrontation with the world around him is a questionable matter. Contemporary man, who is trapped in the limits of society, is looking for a chance to discover his nature at every moment. Navid Moaddeb‘s collection “Confrontation” talks about the encounter between the inner and outer worlds of man. Navid who has been involved with art, specially painting, since childhood has always considered it as a means for his inner knowledge of his surroundings.
To him, art is like a window through which you can communicate with the outside world and therefore find answers to your inside questions. In “Confrontation” Navid is trying to portray the contemporary human’s encounter with his inner self. For this purpose, the places in which the collection is formed are mostly secluded and empty of the conflicts of the contemporary machine world so that they can properly remind the inner world of man. In this long-term series which started two and a half years ago and is still open, time and space are largely suspended and the fact that most of the photos are black and white allows Navid to reduce the audience’s mental conflicts by removing the color and unnecessary visual details and draw their attention to the current meaning of the photos.
Photographed entirely with an analog camera, the series is not entirely predetermined, and improvisation can be seen in many frames. In Navid’s opinion, stage photography, with the amount of logic behind it, is far from the truth of the moment and you can’t gain an understanding of what is happening in the moment in it. So he tries not to take full control of the photography space and leave a part of the work to time and place.
n each frame of this collection the photographer confronts his models with their inner selves. For example, in the second frame, Pirouz, the photo model in his most natural state, is placed among the plants that remind the interiority and nature that our ancestors directly connected with, and the window in front of him is like a window to the outside world.
In general, “Confrontation” can be considered as a result of Navid’s inner self. Photography and its momentary nature, the process of capturing light until the appearance of a photo in analog photography and the relationship between photos and mental backgrounds, are very valuable and make the inner windows meaningful to him. Since it will no longer exist in the same form, the moment of pressing the shutter button and then capturing the photo has an understanding within itself that speaks of the deep layers of the unconscious, of which we are unaware. And each photo with its meaning plays a significant role in revealing Navid’s inner self to the audience.
Photography Navid Moaddeb
