Sara Abbaspour, Art

Name:

Sara Abbaspour

Title:

Assistant Professor of Photography

Department:

Art

Describe your research in about 200 words.

As an artist who works primarily with lens based media, I draw on influences from my background in Urban Studies. While embracing a herstorical approach, my photographs often seem timeless and placeless. The works encompass various forms and subjects, from urbanscapes to portraits and still-lives, and at the same time, intend to study the poetics of spaces in their transitional states. In other words, I explore the relationship between spaces and their inhabitants in their constant state of becoming. I collaborate with these elements and often consider these photographs self-portraits. My work exists in a meeting point between temporal and eternal, inside and out, familiar and peculiar, personal and political, seen and unseen, magic and mundane, imagined and experienced.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

I consider the classroom as a place to exchange knowledge and passion. I continuously refine and relearn enthusiasm, wittiness, profound care, and rigor from the students. The most interesting thing I’ve learned from them has to be this: To be very serious about making work, but not to take the work that is made too serious, to keep experimenting, challenging the presumptions, and taking the following steps.