Images speak: Photographs look at life, one moment at a time

Nashmia Haroon’s photo exhibition opened at Zahoorul Ikhlaq Gallery.

LAHORE:

A photo essay titled An Inner Silence by Nashmia Haroon opened on Thursday at the Zahoorul Ikhlaq Gallery. A slideshow of 72 photographs was displayed at the exhibition which will continue until May 18.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, artist Quddus Mirza said, “Nashmia Haroon’s work not only documents our time and place, but also guide us on how to look at a photograph.

“Behind every picture is an artist, similarly in every photograph one can read signs of political and cultural change.” Mirza said the photographs also conveyed an element of art that was serious, exciting and eternal, regardless of the change in subject.

Haroon told The Express Tribune that the photographs presented were unified by one common element: a moment of silence resonating either in the subject or the artist.

She said she realised that these images could be brought together in a single narrative after revisiting Henri Cartier-Bresson’s curated body of work, whose title she borrowed.

Haroon said photographs were an entry into a moment and the life instilled in it. Haroon said it revealed what the viewer saw in it. She said the beauty of making or taking images was that one could encase all such mindsets and preserve them. She said it allowed one to step out of place and back in time.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 16^th, 2014.