MITRA SAMAVAKI - EXPOSURE emerging photographers showcase

When I left home last year for Canada, I looked every which way for a sense of belonging, security, roots, and, more significantly, for a home. I found myself confronted with endless internal struggles in trying to establish a “marriage” between two homelands so that I could finally create a space that ties me to the new land and feels home. This triggered my reflection on what home means to me and how a new country can begin to feel like home.

As a photographer, I have used my camera to engage with and explore my new surroundings, acting as a therapeutic tool for sharing my there-and-here, tangled emotions. “Home–coming” is my photographic exploration of Calgary, rooted in my immigration experience. It explores how time, and the medium of photography can be used to generate new memories and make new roots in a place that is not yet home. This camera-led exploration has helped expand my sense of belonging, allowing me to embrace the here and now and transform my perceptions of Canada, making it feel like a “home.”

I am influenced by pictorialism photography of the late nineteen century. Metaphorically, this experimental process parallels my experience as an immigrant in Canada; it takes time and needs patience and frustration-tolerance, but it opens new territories to discover. This intensive and immersive process has offered me artistic and emotional control over developing my photographic images. I am using my hand and rendering each print a unique image that cannot be reproduced, even when printed from the same negative. Photographic images, and specifically Platinum prints, are very stable, but memories are not. We might recall some memories accurately, while some parts have been changed or forgotten. Similar to my experience, these photographs live on a threshold, existing between incompleteness and becoming whole.

BIOGRAPHY

Mitra Samavaki (she/her) is an Iranian photographer based in Calgary, Canada. Relying on her experience as an immigrant in Canada, her artworks engage with concepts of in-betweenness, displacement, sense of place and home and relation between memory and sense of belonging.

She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Tehran University of Art, and currently, she is pursuing her MFA at the University of Calgary. She worked as a documentary photographer and photojournalist with several Iranian news agencies, newspapers, and magazines for more than seven years. She has always been fascinated by how art can affect social life and change things for the better. For her, photography is not just the art of catching a moment; it is portraying the extraordinary in ordinary things; she intends to take photos to establish a dialogue with the addressee and raise a question.