Before she discovered photography, Qasimi’s focus was music, and you might guess as much from the visual rhythms of pattern, color, and texture that are her hallmark. The uncannily vivid chromatic progression of diagonal stripes in “Blanket Shop,” which was shot in Jackson Heights, Queens, almost tips into abstraction. The image might even be mistaken for a digitally generated collage, if not for the perpendicular reach of the shopkeeper’s arm, which grounds the scene in physical space. That arm has a feminine counterpart in “Coco,” a picture that centers on a white cockatoo, whose home is a curtain store in Ridgewood. Against a backdrop of drapes the bright pink and yellow of marshmallow Peeps, a woman extends her arm to offer a perch to the bird, intersecting the curtains at a right angle and obscuring the face of a little boy in the lower right-hand corner. Concealing a subject’s identity within a composition is a common device of Qasimi’s. It feels like a tender gesture of discretion, even protection, in a city where private lives play out in public.
In the elegant portrait “Woman in Leopard Print,” a sylph in a disco-worthy hijab turns away from the camera and toward a mirrored compact, which reflects one eye back at the viewer—a frame within the frame. The detail recalls the cropped, mascara-laden eye in Man Ray’s famous Surrealist photograph “Tears,” whose blatant artifice—the “tears” are actually beads of glass—is echoed in Qasimi’s photograph. The woman stands in front of a photomural of manicured hands that conclude in silver-glitter-tipped fingernails. You might think that the artist captured the shot in one of the countless nail salons in New York City. But she staged it in her Brooklyn studio, based on a fleeting moment she witnessed in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach.
