At first glance, the scene seems mundane: a father folds laundry in his backyard while his two daughters play. The photo looks staged meticulously constructed even. But a close look will show the tail of a giant creature emerging from a children’s play tent. In another photograph, a small art gallery is packed with people laughing and joking, looking at paintings. Again, it feels produced, deliberate. And once again, the tail of a mythical beast is there, disappearing up the stairs into an adjacent room. Each of the photographs in this series, called Volcano, are snapshots of Iranians doing everyday tasks with big smiles. But there’s a surreal undercurrent of foreboding.
The photographer, Gohar Dashti, is known for operating in this space between reality and fantasy. Dashti was born in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, in 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution and the same year the Iran-Iraq war began. For the first eight years of her life, conflict reigned, and her photographic work often alludes to that experience.
In naming this series Volcano, she nods both to the more explicit threat of actual active volcanoes in the region (the country sits in the zone between the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates) but also to the ever-present hint of danger: the menace of war and disaster, represented by the giant reptile always there; partially hidden.
While there’s power in allegory, there’s another reason for Dashti’s decision to produce these stage-managed photographs and to use metaphor rather than document negative aspects of living in Iran outright. Following violent protests in the country in 2009, photographers were targeted by authorities who feared footage of the unrest would reach the outside world. Hundreds of journalists and photographers were arrested. As a result, some began to use staged photography arranging their subjects for dramatic effect and using metaphor to tell a deeper story as a way to circumvent censorship, restrictions and red tape, and to avoid becoming victims of a brutal clampdown.
By doing this, artists can chronicle sensitive social issues in their home country, safe from repercussions. “Staged photography in Iran is layered with ambiguity,” Dashti says.
Contributor
Gohar Dashti is a Tehran-based photographer who creates large-scale photographs with a focus on social issues. Her work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Smithsonian (Washington, DC).
