VIEW IN MY ROOM
United States
Photography, Color on Paper
Size: 84 W x 38.8 H x 0.2 D in
Ships in a Tube
Artist Recognition
Artist featured in a collection
I had already been living in Kabul for two years when I took this picture. It is part of series of candid portraits, panoramas and street photographs I made to document childhood in Kabul at the end of the Hamid Karzai era, 2011-2015. This is a museum-sized panoramic image, which I will print only once at this large scale. The photograph - which is made up of some ten combined exposures - plays with ideas like perspective to unfurl a section of lower Nader Khan Hill in Kabul. In the foreground a Kabul street scene is playing out in which children mind a series of street stalls next to a water pump by the road leading up toward the houses in the Nader Khan Hill neighborhood of Kabul, one afternoon at the end of December, 2013. The idea of the picture is not only to explore the world of the children, but also a way to open up a kind of urban landscape of Kabul that feels open enough to walk into. My Kabul panoramas are environmental, in the the sense that they are intended to give the viewer a kind of virtual reality impression of the place. I want you to be able to see all the pieces of gravel on the road, all of the sequins on the girl's dress, to have the feeling of presence and human rather than mechanical vision. Unlike most pictures of children, the children in this image are serious and adult. In Kabul, children grow up early and take on responsibilities to support their families. You can feel seriousness and the weight of this responsibility on the shoulders of the children in this image. I enjoy images that are truly un-staged and authentically documentary in nature. Just as I work to record authentic moments in my documentary film work, I am interested in making photographs that register real life as it is happening and allow the view into the scene. Even when I make a portrait I am trying to capture not just the personality of the subject, but also them at that moment, however they may be. The idea behind all of my work in Afghanistan and the other West Asian countries where I have lived over the past decades has always been to express to a broader audience the beautiful humanity that I found all around me. The people in these countries have suffered greatly through various wars and conflicts, but their character remains stronger than ever. My films and photographs are love poems to my friends and all the people I met and worked with, who collaborated with me to immortalize them in stills and in motion. A portion of my income goes to support people I have filmed and worked with in the past, their education expenses and the upkeep of their families. This single-edition over-size print is signed and unmounted, unframed. This photograph is a unique print at this scale: 84 x 39 inches This size includes a 2-inch border (3-inches on the bottom edge.) There will be only one. Rendered on museum quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, made by a fine art printer using archival inks in the United States. About the paper: Hahnemühle papers are designed for archival storage are acid-free, which makes them highly resistant to ageing. The paper is also lignin-free, which means it should consist of linters or alpha-cellulose. Lignin-free paper does not yellow.
Photography:Color on Paper
Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork
Size:84 W x 38.8 H x 0.2 D in
Frame:Not Framed
Ready to Hang:Not applicable
Packaging:Ships Rolled in a Tube
Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.
Handling:Ships rolled in a tube. Artists are responsible for packaging and adhering to Saatchi Art’s packaging guidelines.
Ships From:United States.
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United States
From a multiple Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning filmmaker who combines fine art sensibility with a passion for communicating the worlds of civilians caught up in conflict, Longley’s film and photography work witnesses places such as Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Through an approach best described as Slow Journalism, Longley creates a big picture view from an intimate perspective. Describing Longley's work in the Los Angeles Times in 2019, film critic Kenneth Turan wrote: "What is life like on the ground for ordinary people in another culture, another world? That’s been the bread and butter of observational documentaries for forever, but almost never is it done with the kind of beauty and grace filmmaker James Longley brings to his Afghanistan-set “Angels Are Made of Light.” As his 2006 Oscar-nominated “Iraq in Fragments” demonstrated, MacArthur Fellow Longley, who serves as his own cinematographer as well as directs, has an almost magical ability to envelope us in other realities. He does it via the poetry of his imagery as well as a gift for focused illumination that creates empathetic portraits of people who are both ordinary and intensely involving." ... In 2009 James was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2011 a USArtists Ford Fellow. These substantial awards helped to create his most recent filmed and photographic work. James has taught master classes at Hong Kong University, Duke University's Center For The Arts, The Goethe Institute in Kigali, and in Zurich for FOCAL. Longley has been nominated for two Academy Awards and won three Jury Awards at Sundance - for Directing, Cinematography, and Editing - among many other heartwarming accolades. 35mm prints of Longley's filmed work can be found in the archives MoMA, The Academy Film Archive, the Duke University Archive, Wesleyan University, The Northwest Film Forum and the Library of Congress. A portion of James' income from the sale of these images goes to support the people he has filmed and worked with the past - particularly in Afghanistan. Please visit James' portfolio site at www.jameslongley.com for more photography and films, and to contact him for custom printing or to commission work.
Artist featured by Saatchi Art in a collection
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