Amak Mahmoodian lives in the UK but her work as a photographer places her firmly in Iran – better still, in Persia– just as Tony Ray-Jones’ or Dorothea Lange’s work situates them, respectively, in England and America.
In Mahmoodian’s case, this was clear from her earlier Shenasnameh, a photobook with a polemical colouring that drew attention to the marginalised status of women in a theocratically-accented regime. Her latest work, Zanjir, also concerns itself with the question of identity but takes a longer perspective, looking back to the past to illuminate the present:
Today
I think about things
that I forgot to remember
Lines like these punctuate Mahmoodian’s photographs of people that she took during a period of research while working in the museum archives of the Golestan Palace, a royal complex that was the home of the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925). The people in her pictures are men and women with whom she is personally acquainted but they often show themselves with the aid of archival photographs from the Qajar period. Holding these photographs in front of their faces, they use historical images of individuals as masks for merging present identities with ones resurrected from the past.
Mahmoodian looks to everyday scenes in public parks, private homes and other locations but the masks deployed in these places are not used for the purpose of disguise. The same people are sometimes seen unmasked, their faces as unhidden as those of other random individuals who happen to be in the same public place. Like unjoined stills taken from a video, the missing motion that would link them can be inferred.
What the photographs enact is the continuity across time that turns history into genealogy: not the tracing of blood lines but of social connectedness rooted in a culture shared across generations.
Interspersed with the portraits are – also in black and white – Iranian desert scenes and, in a short central section, half a dozen pages of crimson-toned photographs of body parts bearing their own pictorials. Such an assemblage, combining them with historical images from Qajar times, can only be effective – and affective – at a poetic level. Taken with the lines of introspective text that intermittingly appear, Mahmoodian’s quest is a search for a sense of belonging.
Zanjir as a publication has an elegance and grace in harmony with its eloquent expression of nostalgia, a word that comes from the ancient Greek nostos (‘return home’) and algos (‘pain’). Nostos describes the journeys of Odysseus and other heroes of Troy in their ardent desire to return to their homeland. Their odysseys are difficult and painful and the bloodiness of hue in the photographs of colour may be looked at as an expression of Mahmoodian’s algos.
She photographically inscribes her own yearning for a homeland and a sense of belonging to the land that nurtured her being. In her own words: ‘The desire to be home and the sorrow of separation create a new narrative, which is now the narrative of my life….The subjects carry the masks of the past, but they are still there. They are present. The masks could be carried by anyone and anyone could become a mask.’
Sean Sheehan
Zanjir, by Amak Mahmoodian, is co-published by RRB Photobooks / IC-Visual Lab
