5:00a.m.: The steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We had one week to get this done due to an impending cross noncontiguous continental move. Tahmina sought me out to recreate an image from ten years before – from another life. Ten years prior she stood on these steps as a belly dancer and a photographer captured her gliding from column to column.
You can’t go back and you can’t recreate the past with 100% certainty. Nor should you. So we made new images that honored that time – that connected the dots of the journey. What a journey it had been. As Tahmina describes it, she set out on the journey to be herself.
Tahmina wanted to dance. She described it as a medium to express what she wants, which is for women to be free. May we each take a moment to consider what makes us free, within our own hearts, and pursue it with courage, perseverance and abandon.
