Building + Becoming featured on UC Riverside News
Amir Zaki publishes 23 years of photography in new monograph, Building+Becoming
by Sandra Baltazar Martínez
With a camera in hand, Amir Zaki captures California’s astonishing beauty — spaces that become precise moments unveiled only at dawn.
“Building+Becoming,” a new monograph by Zaki, an art professor at UC Riverside, will be co-published by X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press. The book showcases a body of work that spans over 23 years. The 272-page monograph is designed as a double gatefold that opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches, allowing the reader to explore images and texts in different combinations.
In this monograph, Zaki weaves stories that capture both nature and architecture. He visits these spaces before the morning’s full sun interrupts the silence and emptiness found in cities, beaches, or any of the landscapes where he places himself to capture environments that are illuminated by the early morning’s soft light. The title of the book, “Building+Becoming,” takes readers on an interactive journey as they simultaneously open the double gatefold pages to find striking images of trees, skateparks, ocean waves, or scenery that makes the reader stop to appreciate the serenity captured in those images. He prefers to photograph landscapes, not people, he said.
“The quality of light in a photograph is something I hold dear,” said Zaki, who has been photographing California since he was a teenager living in Beaumont, California. He attended UCR and graduated in 1996 with a major in art and a philosophy minor.