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People who are middle-aged and still have their parents in their lives may be going through the hard road photographer Ramin Samandari has experienced.
He and his mother were both born in Tehran, Iran. “She was born in Iran, and she lost her husband, my dad, in 2003,” he explained. “She moved to Canada in 2011, so she's been living there since then with my sister.”
His mother’s life in Iran was busy and productive. “When we're growing up, she was a professional level at it," he explained. "There was a period of time that she used to make children's clothes, and stores used to buy them from her."
He added: "She made all our clothes until I was about 13 or 14. All of my slacks, jackets, everything she used to make. She made all her own clothes, and then she was knitting also all of our winter sweaters.”
After six years in Toronto, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
As a professional photographer, Samandari tends to see the world through a lens, and he began taking photos of her since her 2017 diagnosis to illustrate how she changed.
In fact, that theme gave his exhibition its name. “The Long Goodbye is a very sad but very real, accurate term for this, this malady,” Samandari said. “After this last visit, I felt this strong urge to do something. And so that's why I'm doing this exhibit.”
He's taken photographs for the last eight years, so recently he felt it was time to choose the ones which spoke to him most and then create an exhibition out of them.
He’s opening that exhibition in June as part of the Lone Star Art District’s Second Saturday event, where several area artists there open their studios to the public. Admission to all the galleries of Lone Star is free.
