One, Many, And Those Lost In Between: The Photographic Works of Basir Mahmood

Basir Mahmood is an artist and filmmaker based in Lahore and Amsterdam. His photographic work includes poetically constructed images that reflect upon social and historical realities embedded within the terrain of the mundane. These photographs embody a simplicity and subtlety of engagement—objects are often isolated from their social contexts, yet photographed in relation with other objects such that the viewer encounters their social nature.

For instance, his series No Land for a Fisherman was made during a stay in a fishing settlement in Turkey. Through aesthetic exercises in the organisation of objects and people photographed, Mahmood draws the viewer's attention to the layers of meaning that reside in a photograph as well as in the act of image-making itself. His images attempt to capture traces and scents of his subjects and their lived truth through subtle ways using colour, composition and a strategic isolation of the object(s) being photographed.

In many works, Mahmood appears to be grappling with ideas of the one, and the many—in nature as well as human civilisation. The diptych All Divided Equally presents a kind of stereoscopic image—two slightly shifted visions of an array of fruits and vegetables arranged across concrete steps. These images are reminiscent of the proverbial “food pyramid”—a popular diagram in which the foods required for human sustenance are divided in a triangle of necessity and quantity. This triangle is often also overlaid onto Maslow’s hierarchy of psychological needs, which creates a framework of dominant and homogenous needs for humanity at large, as well as each human individually. A similar tension—between society at large and the individual—is metaphorically presented in Mahmood’s photographs.

Another series of images, One for Each, Two for All, further complicates this tension by presenting a crowd of hands and bodies, in various configurations of transaction. It is hard to tell who is giving and who is receiving as the disembodied hands stretch across the frames, pointing towards a blurring of their individual identities in exchange for a body of entangled arms. In All good things, a crowd of bodies is seen in a delicate configuration where each pair of arms attempts to be transacting with the whole structure, thereby expanding on Mahmood’s earlier metaphors of food and hands. 

All images and captions by Basir Mahmood.

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