Lola Hakim
Ant Farm, 2020
Digital Inkjet print
One print: 16 x 20 inch; Two prints: 11 x 14 inches; Two prints: 8 x 10 inches; Two prints: 8 x 8 inches
A woman walks down the street holding a sign. She appears destitute yet seems to walk with ease. Nearby, a young boy cries over a spilled ice cream cone, burying his head in his father’s chest. Another woman, maybe twenty three years-old, applies her makeup at the train station with a small mirror the size of a baby’s hand, while a man with a cigar hanging from his mouth rolls a suitcase behind him. As the shutter of my camera opens and closes, it immortalizes a single point in time that will never transpire again.
In these fractionary moments, I tell a story without words. My aim is to share the diversity of humans in our world through my photographs—a collection of encounters that I witness by chance and want to preserve. As a street photographer, I crave for the subjects of my photos to open up to me and to allow the camera to capture their raw emotions, whether it is a generous smile, a stare of anger, or a laugh that you can almost hear. With each photograph I take, I get to know the collective of unique people on this earth a little bit better. While I am engrossed in these scenes, my task is to encapsulate them without disrupting their spontaneity. Through this process, I have developed my own unique lens through which I see the world.
For my project, Ant Farm, I explored the idea location and what populations they hold. By investigating these populations from afar and up close, it became clear that one cannot understand a population by looking at it through a single perspective. Rather, exploration through both proximal and distant perspectives gives a person a well-rounded, holistic understanding of that population. The significance of the title “Ant Farm” is to contrast the way that people view a population from afar vs. up close. Without immersing oneself into a population, it looks like an ant colony filled with uniform ants walking around. However, when one gets closer they inevitably realize that each human is their own individual that simply belongs to a larger population. The perception from afar often bears a stereotype in which each inhabitant is categorized into. Investigating a population from all perspectives grants a person the most thorough understanding possible.
