Time intersections

 Time intersections

 “Whatever interests me I will photograph; not seeking the extraordinary, but making the ordinary extraordinary” (Edward Weston)

 

 During my walk with a camera through Uzbekistan, which I saw for the first time, I, as usual, looked at the ancient   architecture and the faces of the people around me, soaking   up the “genius loci” and, little by little, “appropriating” what I was photographing (to quote Susan Zontag).

 On the last day I bought a photo album published in Samarkand “A look into the past. Old Photographs”, with many black-and-white pictures by anonymous photographers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.   I wanted to look at them again and again. Among of them were photos that captured the first Uzbec photographer and cinematographer Khudaibergen Devonov.

 I found it interesting to try constructing visual dialogues and intersections between the old photographs and the ones I took on this trip. By using contrasts   and juxtapositions of time layers, I wanted to convey, despite all the difference in time, a certain timelessness and preservation of the cultural heritage, and to obtain a clue for understanding the present.