Dani Martine Arama is a self-taught photographer whose practice is rooted in the long, patient study of everyday life. Working exclusively in film, Martine approaches the medium as an act of pure witnessing — a discipline of presence in which the camera becomes an extension of perception itself.

As It Was draws from a decade of image-making that refuses the logic of curation. The works presented here are unadorned, formally minimal, and deeply intimate — artifacts of lived experience rendered luminous through Martine's intuitive command of natural light and analog process. Shot without intervention and edited with restraint, each image preserves the full weight of the moment it holds.

Martine's work operates in the tension between the personal and the universal. The photographs are autobiographical in origin yet resist narrative closure, functioning instead as open portals — images that do not explain themselves but ask to be inhabited. In this way, the documentary impulse is transfigured: the record of a life becomes an invitation to the viewer's own.

As It Was proposes that beauty is not an aesthetic category but a practice of attention. To stand before these images is to be reminded that the world’s beauty, met with the right quality of looking, is inexhaustible.