Every summer my father had this routine of cleaning our storage room and i used to play around while he was cleaning. Once while i was playing around, this mysterious brown suitcase sitting on the shelf caught my attention and i immediately ask my father "What is inside that suitcase?" And he said its some sort of equipment and then he added you are too young to play with it.
(The actual suitcase)
For couple of years this suitcase remained as a big question mark in my mind until one summer my father decided to show me what is this suitcase and how it works. He explained that its called photo enlarger and he used to develop black and white pictures with this, Looking at photo enlarger was enough to raise my curiosity level and make me want to learn more about it.
Next day i found out that my father bought chemical solutions and the gear to actually develop black and white photos together and teach me the process. We quickly prepared temporary dark room and my father walked me throughout all the steps before we actually try it out. So we placed negative film on enlarger and focused the lenses and adjusted the photo size then exposed photo paper to right amount of time under enlarger and now its time to submerge the photo paper in chemicals and wait. It was truly a magical moment when for the first time i saw the image slowly start to appear on white sheet of paper out of thin air.
After our experimental session i played around with photo enlarger and converted my room to darkroom for a month and did all sort of crazy stuff with photo development but later i realized that i am missing some basics about photography so i decided to take classes and learn everything from scratch.
Soon after courses i discovered amazing community of photographers in my hometown and continued learning within the community. We had many different workshops, group exhibitions and regular photography tours to practice and learn. During my journey i tried Landscape, documentary and advertisement photography but there was something in shooting objects and playing with lighting that made me dive deeper and learn as much as i can about advertisement photography. After months of reading and shooting with my DIY lighting gear and whole lot of trial and errors, finally i gained the confidence to start getting clients. I managed to land a gig from freelancer who used to design websites for factories and companies in my town. We made a partnership together and did handful of projects which helped me build my portfolio.
After a while i started to get clients simply by word of mouth and one of my projects even made it to outdoor advertisement in my town. By that time i graduated from school and decided to start a small photography studio with one of my photographer friends but shortly after that i got job opportunities abroad and left studio to my partner.
Fast forward 5 years, i am working with software company and running a crypto coworking space in Krakow-Poland and i barely have time to touch camera. I was organizing my backup disk where i keep my photographs and i realized if i loose this copy then i lost them forever so i thought it might be a good idea to share my story for the first time here and let decentralized nature of blockchain take care of maintaining my backup (Thank you IPFS). I will be posting my photographs here time to time and hopefully one day i transfer all.
Thank you for reading till the end and stay tuned for photographs that i will be publishing here for the first time.
ARASH