Make Art: Mina Hatami, Artist at Home
Mina Hatami creates and shares imaginative and evocative self-portraiture through the power of photography as a way to connect with others and help them reflect on their own lives and our interconnectedness.
I am a studio art graduate student and my concentration is in photography. I have been working on some self-portrait projects since I have started my studies at Radford University. I work with digital and film cameras, but my main medium is the digital camera.
Capturing the inner self through portraiture always fascinates me and that is the main reason that my works are mainly self-portraits. Although these are self-portraits, I don’t think they are exclusively about me. I like viewers with completely different backgrounds, to feel a connection with the subjects in my works when they take a moment to stop and look at them.
I think light and camera, themselves, are a part of any photographer’s art. I use double exposure and long exposure to show subjects from another point of view which wouldn’t be possible without the use of light and camera.
Thanks to digital cameras, we can more and more practice and learn about the nature of light and how it works. While we are practicing social distancing and spending more time indoors, I think it’s a good time to learn more about different photography devices and see how we can capture the light passing through the camera’s lens. I believe it would be so joyful and surprising to see that, our everyday lives can look so differently by using different features and techniques.