Features

The Moon Belongs to Everyone is a photography book published by Stacy Mehrfar, SVACE faculty member. The book is "a response to contemporary migrations,” writes Aesthetica Magazine, "the feeling of shifting continents and changing mindsets.” The feeling of waking up in a new world may be familiar to many readers as the world population has adopted the new customs of social and physical distancing.

Read on to learn more about Stacy Mehrfar’s insights on identity and immigration - and turning these experiences into art.

SVACE: Congratulations on publishing The Moon Belongs to Everyone, especially through the tumult of 2020, which seems to have slowed production on almost everything. Do you feel as if you were working against the pandemic? Or was the pandemic in some way conducive to work?

SM: Thank you! The pandemic changed the trajectory of everything. We were scheduled to go to press in Verona in March 2020 but had to cancel production at the last minute due to the rise of Covid in Italy. Once it became clear that the pandemic was becoming a worldwide problem, I became anxious about producing the book altogether. I didn’t know when would be the right time to go to press, if it would even be possible at all. At the same time, I had already begun a presale and had sold several copies and artworks to collectors who were expecting their books by mid-2020.  

I eventually came to realize that the hard stop caused by the pandemic had many positive outcomes. I was given the extra time to confirm the sequence and edit, and I had the luxury to swap out one photograph just before we finally went to press in December. Looking back, the results for this project were better than I had expected.

SVACE: You have described how your portrait photos “become less about the individuals and more about a collective consciousness.” In the last year – given the pandemic, the election – we’ve learned more about that concept, “collective.” What does “collective” mean to you, and how does it manifest in The Moon Belongs to Everyone?

SM: The collective vis-à-vis the individual, is a theme I have explored throughout my practice. In The Moon Belongs to Everyone, the collective manifests as a group of people in shared experience, shared emotions, on common ground. 

SVACE: The book is a meditation on migration, identity, and transitory life. You’ve shared how those themes are part of your lived experience. But as an artist, have you ever felt like an immigrant? That is, have you experienced creative changes – in medium, process, habit, or any other creative framework – that left you feeling out of place? Or perfectly at home? 

SM: ALWAYS! I am constantly shifting, changing, growing, feeling out of place. I am not a documentary photographer, but my work is in dialogue with the traditions of documentary. I am not a video artist, but I use video often as a final output. I wrote a poem for The Moon Belongs to Everyone; I had never written one, and by no means am I a poet. One curator recently said to me, “You like a challenge.” I guess he is right. 

SVACE: What were some technical and production challenges you encountered in making the book? How did you resolve them?  

SM: I worked very closely with Claudia Paladini, the production guru at GOST. Once we realized that it was likely that I wouldn’t make it to the printing in Italy, she and I spent many hours on Skype going over the quality of the images, the colors, tonalities, densities. Basically, we tried to make sure she understood my sensibilities. I watched much of the printing on FaceTime, but really I had to trust that she and Stuart Smith, the publisher of GOST Books, would be my eyes and heart. They did a marvelous job. 

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