Kayhan Jafar-Shaghaghi

Changing Ideas Award
This work emerges from a collaboration that sits between authorship and surrender. The sitter, Peter, was turning sixty at the time of making. Rather than directing him, I invited a process of introspection, asking him to move through memories of pride and failure, intimacy and betrayal, tenderness and regret. The shutter release was placed in his own hand, allowing him to determine the precise moment of exposure. The resulting image exists between self portrait and displacement, his life refracted through my gaze, while my own emotional register is quietly transferred onto him.
At its core, the work engages with the condition of ageing masculinity. Within contemporary society, vulnerability in men, particularly older men, remains largely unspoken and often suppressed beneath inherited expectations of resilience, stoicism and control. This photograph attempts to hold space for that absence. The body turns inward, neither confronting nor performing, but withdrawing. In that gesture of withdrawal there is a subtle resistance to dominant visual codes of masculinity.
The analogue process is central to the work. The use of expired materials introduces instability and unpredictability, echoing the fragility of memory and the erosion of certainty that accompanies time. The image becomes less a fixed document and more a negotiation between presence and disappearance, control and chance.
The work is also shaped by my position as an immigrant, negotiating identity, visibility and projection. The exchange between artist and sitter becomes a shared space of displacement, where personal histories overlap and dissolve.
In addressing ageing, vulnerability and representation, the work seeks to reframe the male body as a vessel of lived experience. - the artist