Eyes

Following his series of close-up photographs of mouths, ears, and eyes, Sam Samore’s latest work merges cinema and photography to write one story. Through a process of very slow dissolves, a sequence of still images of eyes – opened and closed – are transformed into a different kind of cinema. Eyes seem to slide across one another, mixing elements – black and white pictures, for example, are infused with tints from the next dissolving color image. With an imaginary treatment of color and a surrealist approach to the unfolding of magical combinations, Samore plays with the symbolism of the eye and its ambiguous place at the threshold between the inner, subjective self and the exterior world. Like a camera one naturally possesses, and with which one constantly creates films about their own reality, the eye becomes a metaphor for cinema itself, a celebration of the poetics of the inner eye.

Eyes, 2023 © Sam Samore
Commissioned by RCRC and Riyadh Art