“It is because I can’t write a poet “
Solace by Ramtin Zanjani

-Blinding

Blink. There is so much light. And between the fluttering eyelids a glimmer and a shimmer that feel like sun wind. Cold and burning at once.

Still more blinking, ever more. Bedazzlement, blinding or illumination? Not to be immediately decided. Except for this light there is almost nothing there. Only endless extents of unmarked white, and between them, a few black flecks.

The dark strokes and dabs appear to belong to an order, but which, is hardly sayable. Sometimes it seems as if, suddenly, rifts crack through the perfect surface structure. Then one feels oneself thrown again into a landscape of sheer random digital processes. Or one is caught in an attempt to decipher the scrawl of apparent speechlessness.   

What actually breaks through the white here is life: defiant head turning boughs in a winter landscape, upward thrusting shoots, vectors written by nature’s will to live on its own canvas. And which Ramtin Zanjani traces in dazzling overexposures.

“The reigning principle of the universe is blindness,” writes Elias Canetti in his novel Die Blendung, meaning blinding and translated into English as Auto-da-Fé. In extreme, magnified simplicity begins Zanjani the consolation of this fatal recognition. The image series is titled “Solace.” One could understand it as a photographic translation of Canetti’s thoughts about blindness: “It enables a coexistence of things that – could they see each other – would be impossible. It permits the truncation of time where one would not have been able to bear it.”

Zanjani’s photographs are naked, and they are pure either/or. But in their contrasts und their coldness also lays their tenderness. The images celebrate a glimpse at the unapparent, that lingers until everything blazes and radiates.

This radiance and the limitation of the  means remind one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Seascapes.” Only Zanjani does not grant us the safety of a reliable horizon. Vanishing points are barely discernible. Yet precisely this lack of perspective here stands for hope. One plummets into the photography of Ramtin Zanjani – and falls exactly as hard or as softly as one’s imagination allows. Against the blank, reflecting background. Or in a blanket of snow and sunlight.

“Blindness is a weapon against time and space,” writes Elias Canetti. “Our being – a single outrageous blindness, save only for the little we experience through our quibbling senses.”
The little that strikes our eye when we blink.

Arno Raffeiner
Translation from German by Page Pavlov