It is some time now since I have come back from Iran. I have now somewhat landed psychically in so far as one can in our accelerated and digitized age. It is as if, today, we do not have the time to assimilate and consolidate material before we somehow need to forget or get past it, in order to take new information in. I wonder if this is what Zygmunt Bauman called a ‘Liquid Life’ in his book with the same title.
He quoted Emerson “in skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
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What has remained, is all that I had managed to capture (seems an apt word given the context I have described), or make, in images and photographs taken during my 4 weeks in Iran. Looking at these photogrpahs, I feel quite struck as I am reminded of a process that was nothing but awe-some and somewhat out of this world (!)
I continued my walking.
I was feeling annoyed and frustrated by the banality of being interested in chadors and veils. It felt like the easiest thing to be interested in coming to Iran. As if a country with 8000 years worth of history and culture has been reduced to this bit of fabric which is splitting the space between myself and the other, you and I. Yet, as I walked the streets of Tehran, for days and hours, in the heat of summer, wearing my own headscarf and modest clothing, I felt like I was gaining proximity.. with something strangely intimate despite this thin, soft, varied textured and patterned barrier.
My intuition had me sticking with the ‘not knowing’ where this was going. And as is often the case with art, persevering and trusting, rewards you. Looking back at the images made through photographs I found the reward staring back at me.
These ‘hazy’ photos are part of a series of photos taken as I was mapping Tehran through walking the streets in silence for a month. I had a camera hung around my neck and I intuitively made images as I walked. I did not frame the images by using a viewfinder. Some images were made as my own headscarf covered the lens. These are examples of those images.
