Self-Portals: Scratching Beneath the Surface of Memories

Ramin Mazur

“My mother once told me about how she and other kids played with negative rolls of film found inside the ruins of her neighbour’s destroyed house,”

photographer Ramin Mazur reminisces while gazing through a bundle of black and white celluloid film strips. This happened, most likely, around the early 1970s, and according to his mother, this neighbour was a military officer who served in the Second World War. The rolls were nevertheless destroyed; burned up and reduced to ashes by the very same kids who found them, and it was only the regret of childish play that survived. What remained stuck as a powerful flashback in the memory of Mazur’s mother, and continued by extension to live inside Mazur’s own memories, presumably contained priceless documentation of the war and its aftermath. Authentic artefacts—archival portals into other worlds—that could have told a different story of past narratives. The artist, who was born on the left bank of the Dniester river in the Moldavian Soviet Republic and who now lives in Chișinău, has ever since collected hundreds of rolls, some bought at local flea markets, others found randomly on the street as if some deity of film stock is trying to revert an ancient curse that Mazur’s mother could not stop from happening.

The resulting archive that Mazur gradually acquired currently amounts to more than 500 film rolls, and it provides a novel insight into a not-so-distant history: a kind of past recorded by people who never thought of themselves as scribes or documentarians, but as regular citizens with hobbies and interests, regardless of social class, economic background, or age group. In these domestic attempts to immortalise surroundings, there is no pretence of facts or objectivity, but rather an uncannily candid rendition of everyday life. Life as it is, life as it should be portrayed. There is no filter that mediates our experience other than, perhaps, the emotional realm that remains present throughout the visual artefacts.

The act of investigating negatives rather than their more visible printed artefacts—the lucky shots that were made alive into photographic prints—allows for a more perceptive understanding of society: the observant becomes aware of the process itself of photographing, which is less result-focused and more interested in a frame by frame approach instead. This is what Mazur refers to as “a gaze into a family photo album that never received the chance to exist.” What is at stake here is not just to examine the everyday lives of our predecessors or to revisit the past itself, but to resurface overlooked traces of material history. It is not the merely historical dimension that fascinates Mazur, but rather the idea that the past contains a myriad of co-existing chronologies and timelines that have been brushed aside from dominant history. 

Mazur does not intervene in the photographs that are brought back to life, as the passage of time is never cleansed, whitewashed, or sugarcoated. The unrelenting scratches, ample light leaks, and collected dust are all forms of telling residual stories that have been forgotten. Just as history itself needs to be read and learned in unsanitised format, so does Mazur seem to tell us that reviving lost histories is almost irrelevant if this pursuit does not take authentic forms and shapes. By salvaging these fragments, Mazur allows the foggy nostalgia that forms on their surface to become portals—just like the rolls that his mother found 50 years ago might have ensured a portal that was lost—into alter-worlds. 

Ramin Mazur was born on the left bank of river Dniester in the Moldavian Soviet Republic, which became the unrecognised state of Transnistria after 1991. Graduating from the Journalism Department of the Moldavian State University in Chișinau, he began working with different print outlets in his country as a photo reporter. After obtaining the “Human Rights and Photography Magnum Foundation Scholarship,” he has focused mostly on independent storytelling, based on observing his surroundings and nearby countries’ realities in their times of transition.