Iman Tajik

Human Just Like You

Iman Tajik,2014
Single-channel video, 2 mins 40 secs (loop)

Human Just Like You is a stop-motion video work created from a series of studio portraits of asylum seekers and migrants. Each portrait was taken with a digital medium-format camera during a sitting in which the artist engaged the participants in open conversation. From these exchanges, Tajik selected a final word or phrase—fragments of personal experience or thought—that became embedded as text within the portraits themselves.

The sequence of images, animated through stop motion, creates a moving tapestry of faces and words. Together, they form a collective portrait that is both deeply personal and profoundly universal. Each image resists invisibility, affirming individuality while speaking to the wider shared experience of displacement and migration.
By combining photography, conversation, and te

xt, Tajik foregrounds the humanity of those often reduced to statistics or political debate. The work insists on recognition: each person is, in the artist’s words, “human just like you.”
Looped in a short, continuous cycle, the video underscores the persistence of these realities and the need for ongoing empathy and solidarity.

**These videos cannot be altered in any way or used for any purpose nor cannot be displayed or exhibited without the consent of the artist. ©ImanTajik