Umarah Rahim

Photography has always been an act of preservation—a defiance against time's erasure. Yet the instant capture of digital imaging distances us from this fundamental relationship with light. I return to historic processes to recover what has been lost: the physical encounter between light, chemistry, and the human hand.

Each process I employ carries its own character. The Prussian blue of cyanotypes speaks of water and sky; salt prints soften time into something dreamlike; wet plate collodion renders flesh with an uncanny presence. These are not merely techniques but languages, each capable of expressing different truths.

My subjects—empty rooms, weathered coastlines, fading flowers, human faces—share a common thread: they exist at thresholds. Between presence and absence. Between memory and forgetting. I photograph what is leaving, hoping to understand what remains.