When 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin created “Even in Arcadia, there am I” he clearly aligned himself with the spirit and optimism of the times. Overzealous with establishing a new world, Enlightenment was after a utopian and optimistic order. This was an era basking in its achievements and celebrating its liberation from the confines of the Middle Ages and giving itself the title of the Age of Reason.Arcadia was that idyllic village Poussin yearned for and thought accessible. He saw his work not only as a new visual rendering of a historical past but as reestablishing and angling a forgotten meaning from the depth of history. Poussin attempts to recall and resuscitate the idyllic pastoral scene was to utilize it to create a new concept of Utopia and Arcadia, the second representing the idea of the unity of mind and matter.
But
Nothing went according to Poussin’s vision of the future of humanity. Enlightenment saw Time as an innocuous and transient and defined History as a flawless tool to record how Time affects human life. But Time didn’t just pass; rather, it left its mark on things. Attrition and forgetfulness was the outcome of this seemingly innocuous passage. As a memory of Time, History was fallible, short-lived, and selective. Thus, meaning was soiled and, without knowing it, Time and History joined hands to render things meaningless.In truth, Enlightenment misrepresented the essence of Time and invented an archive – history – which gradually forced human beings to migrate from their natural state to where the totalitarian mentality reigned supreme. In a self-made dialectic, and with the illusion of filling the gap between mind and matter, the Age of Reason was going from one end of the spectrum to another, and gained nothing in the process.

The authoritarian mentality affected a fissure between cogito and existence to confiscate and conquer utopia and to define ideals anew. Concepts were the same as before but seen in a new light and assigned new functions. Meaning became an abstraction and reality less and less accessible.Thus, history becomes cyclical and doomed to repeat itself without giving us anything. Utopia loses its thrust and becomes a word in the dictionary, nothing remains of it except an impossible objective that modern human beings can only reach in “infinity.” Utopia became a tool to gauge our distance from what we are not and there is no necessity to reach it. This affected distance, which Poussin optimistically ignored, was to bring objective and subjective unity to the two concepts of utopia and reality gone abstract.
Photography emerged as a way to discover the infinite capacities of reality and to feel the limits of its understanding. It revealed a desire to construct a utopian reality by arriving at an exact impression of that singular reality. However, it unwittingly created an alternative reality. Photography became a new toy in the hands of the totalitarian mentality. It was unable to offer an image of existence in connection with its spatial reality but to fragment that singular reality more than ever to reveal the gap between moments.
-Hoofar Haghighi