Since 1999, Anna Hayat and Slava Pirsky have been working together as a duo, developing a shared photographic practice rooted in analog processes and large- and medium-format cameras. At the core of our work are black-and-white Polaroid negative-positive films — Type 55 and 665 — materials that ceased to be produced in 2006. Today, we work exclusively with expired stock, each sheet carrying its own unpredictability and chemical memory. The artifacts that emerge during development are not technical flaws to us, but traces of time — material, physical, and irreversible.

We photograph what will not happen again — using a medium that itself no longer exists. In this sense, the process becomes a gesture of preserving what is disappearing: a double vanishing, layered into every frame. We document presence, fully aware that it has already turned into the past — and we do so on a material that enacts that condition rather than merely representing it.

Our working process is inherently slow. Each image is carefully composed — whether portrait, landscape, or still life — with full attention given to light, spatial relationships, and gesture. The large-format camera demands time and precision, and that slowness is not incidental: it is the method. We aim to make images in which no specific markers of time are immediately visible. What matters to us is a sense of timelessness, ambiguity, and inner stillness — a space where the viewer’s own memory can enter.

In recent years, we have gradually moved beyond photography in its traditional form, expanding the boundaries of the medium. Our works now incorporate stitching, fabric patches on textile-printed photographs, and prints on delicate rice paper combined with painting, earth, and calligraphy. These interventions do not cover or replace the photograph — rather, they emphasize its fragility, its vulnerability, its material presence in the world. Inspired in part by the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi — repairing what is broken and making the repair visible — we treat the photographic image not only as a printed surface, but as an object: something to work with by hand, to alter, to inhabit.

Working as a duo for over twenty-five years, our practice is itself a kind of ongoing negotiation — between two gazes, two sensibilities, two histories. That collaborative tension is present in every image: not as a resolved harmony, but as something held in suspension, like the latent image before it is fixed.