My painting is also in dialog with photography:

Making an image of a person in one sitting...

Both photography and painting abstract.

And a photograph will provide a more accurate, less abstracted two-dimensional image,

but in terms of presence I believe that painting provides something that photography never can. As my friend Ali put it a few years ago:

 

"For a second you can pretend to be what you want to be.

When you are posing for four hours, you cannot pretend any more.

In a picture of a second you can act, you can say

"I want to be this pose, I want to be like that supermodel."

...And you can give that impression, but when you paint from a photograph, that's all you are going to get.

If you paint from reality, during those four hours, you cannot pretend to be something other than what you are."

 

Ali Mahdavi