Manifesto of Tactile Photography by Anna Hayat and Slava Pirsky
Matter over Image
For us, a photograph is not a visual code or information. It is first and foremost a physical body, with its own skin of emulsion, its own scars, its own resistance. We work with the image the way one works with canvas or stone: cutting, joining, layering, and intervening with our hands. What draws us is the tactility of the frame, something impossible to reproduce in the digital world.
Working with Vanishing Materials
We shoot on film that officially no longer exists. Positive-negative Polaroid has long been discontinued and has become part of history. We work with a ghost material, one that is physically ageing and dying with every passing year. Each work is a dialogue with fading chemistry. The world’s supply of this film is finite, and once it is exhausted, the possibility of creating such images will vanish forever.
The Power of Uncertainty
Incertum is a Latin word meaning uncertainty, doubt. This is our credo. We deliberately leave room for chance: for the will of the chemistry, for the physical resistance of the material. A true image is born where the artist’s intent meets the autonomy of the process, and neither one wins.
Rifts and Joints
The world is fragmentary. We never see the whole picture, only shards, details, layers. We explore the boundaries of the whole: where one image ends and another begins. By connecting the incompatible or exposing fractures, we create a new topography. A rift, for us, is not a defect – it is the place where the true structure of reality emerges.
The Archaeology of Time
We do not capture the moment. We work with duration. Using expired film, complex overlays, and manual interventions, we extract hidden layers of time from the image. Our works are not photographs of the present. They resemble testimonies unearthed during an excavation of memory.
The Gesture of the Hand
The work does not end at the moment of development. We continue it by hand: stitching across the surface of the print, applying earth and pigment, introducing calligraphy into the space of the frame. This is not a commentary on the image. It is an attempt to give it a voice, to find the sound or rhythm that already exists within the frame, but has not yet been heard.
Two Gazes, One Image
We have been working together for over twenty-five years. Every work is the result of a negotiation between two gazes, two histories, two senses of space. That tension is present in every frame, not as a resolved harmony, but as something held in suspension. Like a latent image before it is fixed.