The Crier

Persian Visions: Iran as You’ve Never Seen It

Andy Kroll · Cultured · Nov 01, 2007

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian short story writer and playwright, once described each of his stories as a “slice of life,” each one a moment or a flash glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. For Chekhov, his short stories and tragicomedies offered brief glimpses of life in nineteenth-century Russia, describing tangled love affairs and lives steeped in drudgery and melancholy. Chekhov’s writing defined a generation of Russians and ultimately transformed modern theater. The medium of photography is even better suited for catching those types of brief moments than stories and dramas. And just as Chekhov’s writing brilliantly depicted Russian life before the time of Stalin, “Persian Visions,” a survey of contemporary Iranian photography currently on exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art Off/Site, captures many “slices of life” from a country whose culture and customs remain somewhat mysterious to Americans.

“Persian Visions” is the first exhibition of modern Iranian photography to tour the United States since the Iranian revolution in 1979, an uprising that transformed the country from a monarchy to an Islamic republic. The exhibit features the work of twenty of Iran’s most celebrated photographers, including renowned photographers Bahman Jalali, Saeed Sadeghi and many more. As a number of the photographs reflect, many of these photographers remained in the country during the 1979 revolution as well as the 1980s cultural revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.

The photographs of “Persian Visions” illustrate that there is much more to understanding Iranian life than wars and those left in its aftermath.

Iran’s tumultuous past manifests itself in several photographs on display, most notably Mohammad Farnood’s “Myth of War,” “Survival” and “Norooz.” Farnood’s photographs depict a group of men carrying automatic weapons; the face of a bandaged and bloodied man; and a robed woman, with her child in her arms, mourning the death of a loved one whose picture rests nearby. Farnood’s focus on the faces of his subjects emphasizes their depth of expression.

But the photographs of “Persian Visions” illustrate that there is much more to understanding Iranian life than wars and those left in its aftermath. These photographs convey the complexities and the depth of Iranian culture through a variety of perspectives and techniques, helping to understand a world that we know so little about yet can still relate to. In Shahrokh Ja’fari’s collected photographs, the world is seen from the perspective of a child, still awestruck and amazed at what life has to offer. The shadowy black-and-white photographs of Majid Koorang Beheshti produce a sense of anonymity, as an unknown woman walks down the street and tosses her hair over her shoulder beneath an overcast sky. And in Shahriar Tavakoli’s family portraits, he is joined by members of his family, both young and old, in what could easily pass as a typical American family photograph.

Although our ideas of Middle Eastern culture often instill exotic and foreign images, many of the themes captured in “Persian Visions” are not so different from our own: family, mortality, place and, above all, the vicissitudes of daily life.

Although our ideas of Middle Eastern culture often instill exotic and foreign images, many of the themes captured in “Persian Visions” are not so different from our own: family, mortality, place and, above all, the vicissitudes of daily life. This is epitomized in Farnood’s 2002 photograph “Daily Life,” in which a young man, playing an accordion, stands on a desolate corner as snow falls from the night sky onto his shoulders. The photograph feels as if it were cut out from the Iranian night sky, a moment taken from time, providing a glimpse of Iranian life that is both commonplace and extraordinary.

In a sense, each photograph contained in “Persian Visions” represents its own unique window with which to view of Iranian life. And beyond each of these windows lies its very own slice of life, one that captures a culture that seems so different yet at the same time so familiar.