Eye in Ink
How does your creative process take shape - do you write first or photograph first?
What style of photography do you like the most?
Dear Levi and Faršid,
First of all, thank you for your questions.
Levi, to begin with yours.
I don’t primarily call myself a photographer.
I am, before anything else, a poet.
The camera is simply my second pair of eyes.
What I write comes from within.
What I photograph is how that inner world sees back.
Sometimes a single sentence lives inside me for weeks
- a drop of ink that refuses to fall.
But when it finally finds its place in my black notebook, Black Passport,
an image unfolds.
Never the other way around.
It’s as if the sentence was waiting to become visible.
Like this answer now.
After the quiet struggle of writing and erasing,
falling and rising again,
the title suddenly appears, not as a thought, but as an arrival:
Eye in Ink.
And everything becomes clear.
From that moment, the process moves by itself.
All I need is the poetic image
and a finger to press the shutter.
There it is.
A poetic abstraction
embodied in something worldly and real.
Poetic documentary.
Just as the eye unveils the soul,
poetry gives my images their pulse.
Without vision, the soul is imprisoned.
Without images, poetry walks blind.
I need my poetic eye
to see what the ordinary eye passes by.
Not to beautify,
but to look more honestly.
Photography and poetry are not disciplines to me.
They are two lungs.
They breathe into each other.
They dream the same dream.
They sleep under the same blanket of meaning.
So yes, Levi,
it always begins with the word.
Everything else is resonance.
And Faršid, your question about style.
I am still young,
and my style is still unfolding.
But if I look at what ties my work together,
it is that one thread:
Poetic documentary.
I owe that phrase to Tarkovsky,
but also to the uncompromising, underground genius
of Michel Acherman.
Both taught me what it means
to look with a mature poetic eye.
Those are the eyes I want to stand next to.
That is the direction I follow.
That is the will I trust.
I hope my answer reaches the heart of your questions.
With love,
Coma