Photo: Jess Camacho

Yasi Ghanbari (Post-Baccalaureate Certificate ’08) makes photographs that tell the stories of lovesick young men and women revisiting romantic moments and places from their past. She herself, however, is not one to pine. “I’m even-keeled and definitely not obsessive,” she says. “That’s what attracts me to this kind of scenario. I’m interested in enacting things that I’m unfamiliar with.”

Ghanbari creates backdrops that show characters in casual situations—a woman tossing an armful of leaves on a fall day, for example. She then photographs a man attempting to insert himself back into the scene, ducking the leaves as if they were real. Ghanbari calls the series “Pathetic Fallacy,” referring to the practice of attributing human emotions to inanimate objects. “He’s trying to reclaim something by doing this,” Ghanbari says. “He’s trying to make a tangible object out of a memory and a place.”

It was an exhibition of Barbara Probst’s photographs that steered Ghanbari in this multi-layered direction. Probst uses several cameras and a radio-controlled release system to make different pictures of one subject at the same moment. “Her photographs tricked me,” Ghanbari says. “At first the images seemed banal, but then you realized what was happening.” After spending hours taping together 11x17-inch printed panels to create several large backdrops, Ghanbari borrowed cameras from friends and had them stand in for a fancy shutter-release system. For “Pathetic Fallacy,” she took the idea a step further, returning to the scene depicted in some of the backdrops to make her photographs, so the viewer sees the image up close, where it’s difficult to discern what is backdrop and what is not, and then from a wide angle, where the character’s wistful desperation is clear. “Yeah, I worry a little that people who don’t know me will think I just make pathetic relationship pictures,” Ghanbari says with a laugh.

This spring, Ghanbari will pick up a video camera and begin working on a documentary, returning to her filmmaking roots (she earned a B.A. in cinema studies at Oberlin College). It’s a little scary, she says. “I started doing photography because it was easier to isolate ideas and simplify a concept,” she says. Right now, “my thoughts are more muddled, so I am trying to clean them up. It is going to be a hard process.”