Rabih Borji

Photography Exhibition | 2019

Photos tell your history. You might forget who you were at certain moments, but photos do not. Like literature, music, or architecture, photos hold the power that delivers beauty, truth, and relationships in your history, and that power never diminish. Soundscape Style Photography is a new aesthetic creation that combines visual and aural arts. You will be able to view and hear your stories through the art.

“Photograph: a picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused on to light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment, or stored digitally.”

“Sound: vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.”

What is it about photography and memory? Why is the photo album the one thing most people would grab in a fire before running out the door when the house is burning down?

In Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still, Mann argues that our memory becomes the photograph as it strips away the real memory of the person or event. She explains this as “Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their memories.”

“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” — Destin Sparks

Wandering around Ataturk Boulevard and taking photographs with the camera for design studio course. I realized that there a very important factor missing which I wish to be there. At first, It was not that easy to define that factor, but later on while walking on the boulevard and recording videos this time I found out that the city soundscape is not well planned.

I dived more into the topic to learn more about the experience of sounds in our daily and found out that it is really playing an important role on our mood and psychological effect while moving on the boulevard even if we don’t take care of it.

To highlight the topic I decided that I need to take still photos that can a tell a story. And what is better that a live ambiance recorded sound to tell this story?

The hard part of the project was I need to hold my camera to capture the moment I want and then at the same time record the sounds using a microphone. The things doesn’t stop here, where the recordings are mostly long and are on a one spot area. Firstly, I needed to choose the segments that works well for each photograph I took. Then, I experienced it the effect of the sound with the photograph on the people memory. At the very beginning, the experiment worked out.