FATEMEH BURNES drift “This book is a dream,” writes Peter Frank in his essay to Fatemeh Burnes’ drift “… of sorts. Its moments are real, but its course is fantastical.” Burnes, accomplished as both painter and photographer, went out into the world to look, and came back into the studio with more than she expected. Rather than merely peer at things, Burnes got involved with them, both with their lonely, offhand beauty and with the poignancy of their human resonance. Without sacrificing the integrity of the individual pictures, Burnes organized them – or found them organizing themselves – into a sprawling, swooping narrative, one that flits from page to page even as it soars in the mind. Drift is a freewheeling exploration of both nature and human nature, at once a gorgeous book object and a compelling jump into the universe.
About Fatemeh Burnes
Fatemeh Burnes was born in Tehran. She emigrated to the United States in 1973, while still in her teens, and settled in Southern California after several years of travel worldwide. Classically trained in Persian art and poetry while in Iran, Burnes later studied western artistic practice – including painting, drawing, and photography – in Tehran, Florence, and at the California State University campuses in Long Beach and Fullerton. She has taught extensively throughout Southern California, and since 1992 has directed the art gallery at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, near Pomona.
Burnes exhibited extensively (as Fatemeh Holste) in the 1980s and ‘90s, and has returned to active art-making and exhibiting after a ten-year hiatus. It is in this return that Burnes has emerged as a photographer, devoting herself to this medium with an emphasis equal to that she has always brought to her painting. “I live through my brush,” Burnes now observes, “and breathe through my lens.”
Technical specifications
Hardcover, cloth with paper jacket
12.25 x 12.25" (31.1 x 31.1 cm)
168 pages
193 color & black/white plates
Edition of 1,000
ISBN 978-1-937222-06-2
Released: November 2011
Editor: Peter Frank
Essays by Peter Frank & Tyler Stallings
$60.00
Clamshell box deluxe edition with signed photograph - Edition 40 / $225.00