Iranian photography reveals a radical aesthetic, embracing both beauty and political resistance, that is shared by practitioners based in Iran--who have devised innovative responses to that country's political restrictions--as well as Iranians in exile--who have been able to create politically and culturally provocative works for the past 30 years. Shirin Neshat and Kaveh Golestan are perhaps the best-known photographers featured in this publication, which also introduces the work of 34 equally accomplished artists--including Reza Aramesh, Parastou Forouhar, Abbas Kiarostami, Amiral Ghasemi and Shadi Ghadirian. Along with images of their work, some of which has rarely been seen, each photographer contributes a narrative about their life and artistic practice, creating a definitive document on the state of contemporary Iranian photography that transcends Western cliches and misconceptions about the culture of this singular country.
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Homi Bhabha is a central figure in cultural studies and has been invited to to deliver kectures around the world at important institutions, including The University of London, England, whilst holding a more permanent position at the University of Chicago and Harvard University since 1997.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Iran through a different lens,
By Francis Reynolds (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Iranian Photography Now (Hardcover)
Writing in the wake of the Iranian revolution nearly three decades ago, Edward Said, in Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, argued that "'Islam' is peculiarly traumatic news today in the West... During the past few years, especially since events in Iran caught European and American attention so strongly, the media have...covered Islam: they have portrayed it, characterized it, analyzed it, given instant courses on it, and consequently they have made it 'known.'" What the West 'knows' of Iran still comes to us largely through sensational journalism and scaremongering governments. The recent Green Wave movement took many in this country by surprise, not only by its scale and intensity, but also by the very fact that it made visible opinions and ideologies covered over in prior Western accounts of the country.
As a kind of artistic complement to this nascent awareness of the intricacies of Iranian political life, a new photography anthology, Iranian Photography Now, reveals an astonishing level of aesthetic and cultural complexity that has gone under the American radar for too long. The collection's thirty-six photographers differ greatly in terms of style and approach to their medium, but some common themes still emerge. There's Shadi Ghadirian's women dressed in traditional, early twentieth-century clothes holding objects smuggled into Iran--a Pepsi bottle or a boom box; Reza Aramesh's elaborately-staged scenes of war and occupation enacted in comfortable living rooms; Mehran Mohajer's illicit cultural packages: outlawed newspapers wrapped around banned books. A personal favorite is film-maker Abbas Kiarostami's elegant black and white series of snow-covered landscapes. These are images of resistance--certainly to governments, but also to conveniently reductive encapsulations of a country long essentialized in American conceptions. The artists, as Homi Bhabha says in his introduction to the collection, "resist the temptation to become truth-tellers--they know too much about the dangerous slide of dogmatic truth into political tyranny." -From Guernica web magazine
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Solid International-Awareness Seminar,
By Lily-Farida (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Iranian Photography Now (Hardcover)
Where Iran used to be noted for its beautiful poetry, miniatures, and exquisite carpets, in this book one can learn how contemporary Iranian artists, who do not necessarily have an easy life, cope with their environment, which is crowded and quite often repressive. Some excellent photographs catch your breath: e.g. the women's police academy climbers. Well done and worth the cost.
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