(Host) We often think of Iran as a society of monolithic religious
fundamentalism – and as The Enemy. But according to long-time Vermont
journalist and commentator Tom Slayton, an exhibition of Iranian
photographs at the Fleming Museum in Burlington through May 20 shows us otherwise.
(Slayton)
What we find when we enter another culture is a different way of being
human – but one that at a deeper level is somehow familiar and not so
different after all.
That complexity is one of the attractions pf
"Persian Visions," the exhibit of Iranian photographs now on display at
the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum in Burlington. These
photographs feel mysterious yet at the same time speak to us deeply.
Take
the beautiful black-and white photos done by Ebrahim Kadem Bayat, for
example: a mysteriously veiled woman, a chair, draped in a transparent
veil, and a flowing stream, deliberately photographed at a slow shutter
speed, so that the rushing water assumes a diaphanous, veil-like
quality.
The veiling of women is one of the characteristics of
the Muslim world that we westerners commonly find most troubling. Yet
Bayat’s images evoke a more complex set of responses. The veiled chair,
for example: it is still visible beneath the misty veil that covers it.
We can see it’s a chair. And yet it has been transformed, made subtler
and more mysterious by being veiled – and then photographed.
So
there is a subtle dance between mystery and clarity going on in this
series. The fact that the silver gel prints are quite beautiful in their
own right adds to their shimmering allure.
There are other less
favorable references to veiling in this show of Iranian photographs.
Yahya Deganpoor’s image of a woman’s eyes, contained in a boxlike
outline, with a barred opening for a mouth is a clear protest against
the repression of women represented by the burkha, while Esmail Abbasi’s
image of a figure wrapped in cloth, chained at the feet while birds
whirl freely in the air overhead is an obvious image of the human
repression represented by veiling.
Yet overall, the impression
of veiling left by the show is ambiguous, charged with mystery and a
pleasing complexity. And all this tells us something we might not have
understood about that very foreign practice of veiling.
"Persion
Visions’" offers the viewer much more – there are photographs that
engage us in areas that we can, as fellow human beings, immediately
respond to – love of family, questions of identity, aging, maleness and
femaleness. And there are also images that tell us something about the
complexity of the Iranian world – references to the world of ancient
Persia, to the incredible richness of Islamic culture, and to the
officially controlled channels of modern communication, especially
television.
"Persian Visions" is a powerful antidote to our own
official view of Iran as the "other," the enemy. In it we are admitted
through the eyes of several brilliant artists to the complexities of
Iranian culture – and to the underlying complexities of human beings
with hopes and fears much like our own.
It is that tension
between a different world, seen through eyes and minds that share a
common humanity — along with its stunning visual beauty – that makes
this show of photographs, "Persian Visions," so powerful.