Seeing Things

31 Jul 2010 by Paul Rutherford

A previous boss (I’ll spare his blushes) once said to me:  ”To do things differently, you have to see things differently”.

Since then, life has been a constant search for new ways of looking: You can find alternative lenses in the most unexpected places.

Indeed, the less expected, the fresher the view.

In recent weeks, it’s been a book of photographs that has challenged and inspired in equal measure: Iranian Photography Now, a portfolio collated by writer and curator Rose Issa.

And it shows that however stuck you appear to be, there’s always a solution.

LIFE THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS

You don’t have to be a cultural commentator or an expert on Middle Eastern affairs to know that Iranian artists work under a very strict set of rules. And that’s especially true of women photographers.

In fact, at first pass the terms’woman’, ‘photographer’ and ‘Iranian’ seem highly unlikely to occur in the same sentence.

Yet their field is burgeoning and they have become a loud voice in an oppressed world, making statements about themselves, their position in society and the restrictions placed on them.

Take the role of the hejab (scarf), and the expectation of covering one’s head and face in public. Boy, that must make for interesting portraiture?

Shadi Ghadirian has taken it to its logical conclusion; portraits without faces at all. She replaces them with domestic appliances which, as well as creating rather eerie images, makes a statement about many women in Iran who subjugate their individuality, and dedicate themselves to their household duties.

It’s a brilliant solution to a seemingly impossible problem. The no-face portrait.

HOLDING UP A MIRROR

The hejab is the expected attire of women in public; in private, they dress differently. However, there are still expectations about behaviour at home, and the mixing of the sexes. Despite this, it’s an open secret that people hold ‘Western’ parties behind closed doors, often with alcohol.

It’s a part of Iranian reality that’s unshowable.

Yet Amirali Ghasemi has done just that in her photography. Which might sound potentially dangerous – would you want to be photographed in such compromising circumstances?

Her solution is to whiten out the faces and arms (bare arms are forbidden) of her subjects. They are now negative spaces, around whom the party happens.

The extraordinary thing about this solution is that rather than de-humanising the image, her pictures become more universal, no longer a particular group of friends, but of an entire people.

Mehraneh Atashi takes a different approach to the segregation of the sexes. She has created a series of images taken at a zoorkhaneh, a traditional Iranian gymnasium. She used flattery and the power of photography to gain access – dressed in her hejab.

What she didn’t tell her subjects was that by using the mirrors in the rooms, she’d include herself in the pictures.

There are many ways of reading this; her relative size to the men, the fact that she in completely enshrouded, the modernity of her camera technology and the timelessness of the exercise regime. I’ll leave the meaning to you. What’s important here is that she worked within very strict rules to solve a problem and challenge the status quo.

PART OF THE SOLUTION

All three of these artists are making political statements (national, religious and gender). They are brave women doing something important that’s beyond my experience.

What is clear to me is the sheer creativity these photographers have brought to their work. They operate in a world where the permissible is rigidly defined, the forbidden made obvious at every juncture.

Yet they have looked at the rules through different eyes, and found new ways of creating WITH rather than IN SPITE of them.

(These images are not ‘black market’ insurrection; all have been publicly exhibited in Iran.)

All of us in business are faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles: legislative, competitive, budgetary. But is any of this as apparently restrictive as the Iranian fundamentalist regime?

Next time you’re faced with a problem, remember these photographers and the fact that they use barriers to their advantage – making them part of a creative solution, not an excuse for inaction.

“To do things differently, you have to see things differently.”