Building + Becoming reviewed on OC Art Blog

The Light Thief: A Self-Aware Modernist

by Meg Linton

An Amir Zaki photograph of a pier on a foggy day. The framed image is disorienting and appears as if viewed from both above and below.

©Amir Zaki. On Being Here: Built in 1927. Renovated in 1936, 2021. Ultrachrome Archival Photographed. 60” x 48” Framed.

Amir Zaki’s X Artists’ Book title Building + Becoming is reviewed by Meg Linton:

“Photography is so much about cultivating a skill of sustained observation.” – Amir Zaki

Recently, a colleague, Edward Cella, recommended I go visit the studio of Amir Zaki, a photographer he has worked with over the years located in Huntington Beach. The studio is hidden in a nondescript business complex amongst wood finishers, commercial printers, and a jet ski repair shop. Zaki met me at the door and walked me through the office which houses a small family business making yoga props and led me to the back workshop area where he had a stunning new series of photographs called On Being Here pinned to the wall.

In 2021, Zaki made pre-dawn pilgrimages to piers peppering the Southern California coastline to capture their awakening to a new day. Oftentimes, he would be the only one out there with the birds, sand, and sea swirling about these monuments of industry. At first glance, the piers are just that, lovely pictures of something familiar, nostalgic, a known quantity. However, the more I looked, the more I saw. These desolate, lonely photographs were slightly off kilter. The light wasn’t matching up between top and bottom. What Zaki created was an upstairs/downstairs effect as if the structure on deck is of one world and the pillared warrens below were a portal to another.

Read the full review on OC Art Blog here.

Editors - X Artists' Books