Review - Richard Moss enjoys the everyday poetry in the photographs of Mitra Tabrizian, showing at Tate Modern until August 10 2008.
Tate Britain is currently hosting the first major UK exhibition of work by the Iranian-British photographer and film director, Mitra Tabrizian.
Eighteen large-format and panoramic photographs on display engage with a wide range of contemporary social and political issues - each presented via a series of photographic tableaux.
Highly influenced by New Wave Iranian Cinema, Tabrizian’s work is presented as a series of haunting and filmic portraits, rather like film stills, in which the protagonists act out a series of strange and lonely narratives.
Characters are posed and photographed in the midst of desolate and incongruous landscapes and still interiors. Narrative panels reveal that these are real people with their own poignant stories.
Borders, a series of powerful photographs from 2005–6 features immigrants who have left Iran and crossed borders in search of a better life. Each of the characters is shown lost in thought as though reflecting on their individual life stories and the alien environment that now surrounds them.
We meet a carpet seller, a singer, a former bodyguard of the Shah of Iran; each of them having brought traces of their former lives with them, seemingly divided between the past and the present and caught between a longing for home and the desire to fit into their new environments.
Elsewhere a strong anti-corporate theme emerges via a series from 2000 called Beyond the Limits. It includes a photograph of an office building at night, which at first glance seems like any standard large format photograph, until you notice a body in mid-flight hurtling to the ground.
Other photographs in this series pluck people in suits out of their office environments and transplant them into incongruous settings – urban landscapes, a garden or the middle of an urban highway.
The urban dystopia continues with a series of pieces taken in Tabrizian’s native Iran. The most impactful is a panoramic photograph populated by an irregular set of characters taken in a run down residential area in the Iranian capital.
Tehran (2006) is a strangely affecting work which shows people who are living on the edge; a taxi driver, factory worker, builder, cleaner, dress-maker and servant – each oblivious of the other as they wander in the scrubland next to high rise flats and watched over by political and religious leaders who stare down on them from billboards.
According to the curator of the exhibition, Rose Issa, Tabrizian’s work “champions the poetry in everyday life and the ordinary person by blurring the boundaries between, fiction, and reality, feature film with documentary.”
With strong themes of corporate culture, ageism, nomadism and ideas of homeland emerging from the photographs on show, there is much here that everyone, wherever they are from, will be able to connect with.
