Shirana Shahbazi

From Photojournalism — Can a Single Photograph Represent Reality?

Shahbazi was born in Tehran in 1974, moved with her family to Germany in the 1980s, and studied photography in Dortmund and Zurich. Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles describes her work as moving across classifications while drawing on art-historical genres such as still life, portraiture, and landscape^*24 Mirabaud similarly describes a body of work in which photographs made across different regions resist becoming simple representations of a nation or period^*25 In a 2023 interview, Shahbazi explained that growing up in a politicized family and social environment initially led her toward photojournalism, but that migration to Germany and photographic education made her increasingly aware of contradictions in the relationship between a photograph and external reality^*26 In the same interview, she said migration made belonging to a single place less self-evident and heightened her awareness of the ways viewpoint, language, and translation shape meaning^*26Her move away from photojournalism was therefore not a retreat from reality into abstraction. She retained photography’s capacity to convey the world while making the viewpoint from which an image is produced, and the language or culture within which it is read, part of the work’s problem.

Goftare Nik / Good Words — Everyday Photographs beyond an Exoticized Iran

The early major work Goftare Nik / Good Words is a color series of streets, people, landscapes, and everyday scenes in Tehran. In 2002, The Guardian noted how its accumulation of ordinary fragments countered the simplified image of Iran produced by news and tourist imagery^*10 Coverage of the Citibank Photography Prize that same year likewise emphasized the work’s documentary clarity alongside its refusal to reduce a nation or culture to a single narrative^*11 The Museum of Contemporary Photography describes the series as an examination of how culture, religion, and identity in contemporary Iran are produced through images, and notes that its mixture of incidental scenes and staged photographs disrupts a simple East/West binary^*27The aim is not to correct an external stereotype with one photograph of the “real Iran.” The work instead shows the process by which individual images align with, or depart from, expectations already held by viewers outside the country.

Analog Abstraction — Photographing Three-Dimensional Constructions to Make Nonfigurative Images

Shahbazi’s geometric color works can appear digitally generated, but they are made by arranging painted three-dimensional objects in the studio and photographing them with analog cameras, sometimes through multiple exposures. MoMA’s page for Composition-30-2011 confirms that forms which appear to be flat fields of color originate in photographed objects^*4 Composition-40-2011 uses the same method, producing abstract fields of color from objects and light placed before the camera^*5 An Untitled work in MoMA’s collection provides another example of the abstract photographs from this period^*8The abstract forms could have been produced through painting or computer graphics, yet Shahbazi routes them through physical objects, light, lens, and film. She does not discard the link between photography and reality that had troubled her in photojournalism. Instead, she stretches that link toward nonfiguration by changing what is placed in front of the camera and how many exposures are made. MoMA’s New Photography 2012 similarly describes these works as photographs made through assembly and in-camera manipulation^*2 MoMA’s artist page lists Composition-40-2011, Klausen Pass-03-2011, Untitled, and other works together, making abstraction, landscape, and still life visible as parts of the same photographic practice^*9.

Placing Still Life, Landscape, and Abstraction Side by Side

In MoMA’s New Photography 2012, Shahbazi combined still lifes, landscapes, abstractions, and wallpaper-scale images within the same exhibition space^*1 MoMA Inside/Out describes an installation in which photographs from different genres are placed next to one another so that repetitions of color, shape, and scale become as prominent as differences in subject matter^*6 MoMA’s audio guide likewise explains how photographs of abstract studio constructions, black-and-white photographs made outdoors, and wallpaper were combined into a single installation^*7This approach to display did not begin suddenly with the Hammer Museum in 2008, but that project made one of its operations especially clear: an Iranian sign painter translated one of Shahbazi’s new Los Angeles photographs into a wall-size painting, placing the photograph and its transformation into another medium within the same architectural space^*3 The Hammer’s residency record confirms that making the new photographs and collaborating with the artisan were part of the residency itself^*14 A public lecture was also organized for Shahbazi to discuss the production of the work^*13When the colors of a flower photograph continue into a neighboring geometric image, the flower can no longer be read only as a still life, while the abstract photograph can be reconsidered as an image of physical objects. Shahbazi uses post-shoot arrangement and translation into other media to prevent the subject of any single photograph from fixing the meaning of the work.

Then Again — Holding Authenticity, Construction, and Selection Together

In the book and exhibition Then Again, photographs from different periods and genres are reedited across the boundaries of their original series. Galerie Peter Kilchmann’s publication information identifies this reediting as a defining feature of the project^*19 Galerie Rudolfinum likewise centered the exhibition on the way photographic authenticity, construction, and selection operate together rather than excluding one another^*20Street photographs and studio constructions are both recombined after the fact with works from other years. The fact of how an image was made is therefore not enough to determine the meaning of the series; what it is later placed beside becomes part of the production process as well.

Group Show — Rebuilding the Exhibition Each Time

In Group Show, an exhibition devoted to a single artist is installed as though different bodies of photographs belonged to a group exhibition. Camera Austria documents large color and black-and-white works, abstractions, and representational photographs creating a strong rhythm across the walls, with the arrangement of the room taking precedence over continuity within any one series^*15 The institution’s press material similarly describes the exhibition as creating relationships through wall color, scale, and sequence rather than fixing photographs to a single meaning^*17The same photograph may have different neighbors and a different scale in another exhibition. In Group Show, the images actually placed beside one another and their sizes determine how the work is encountered as much as the name of any series.

First Things First — Editing by Visual Affinity Rather than Chronology

First Things First is not a photobook that preserves years of work in chronological order or by series. Sternberg Press describes it as a publication in which still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and abstractions are arranged without being separated by series^*12 The MIT Press record likewise notes that works from different periods are reedited through changes of scale and sequence^*21As the pages turn, colors, contours, and recurring motifs link photographs from different moments before continuity within a single series takes hold. The operation Shahbazi uses in exhibitions—placing different photographic genres beside one another—is translated in the book into the relation between one page and the next.

Why Analog? — Delaying Results and Limiting Options

In an interview with Mutina, Shahbazi gives concrete reasons for using analog cameras: because the result cannot be checked immediately, she looks more carefully while photographing; fewer parameters can be manipulated in printing than in a digital workflow; and selections are made from contact sheets^*16 In a 2023 interview, she again avoids treating analog as an absolute value, describing it as a way to create time for thought and experimentation while noting that she also uses digital images in lithography^*26For Shahbazi, the value of analog photography lies in these working conditions: no immediate review during exposure, a restricted range of corrections, and selection from contact sheets. Avoiding an environment of virtually unlimited adjustment concentrates attention on observation at the moment of photographing and on a finite set of later interventions.

The Curve — Refusing the Divides of Iran/West and Document/Construction

Reality Show likewise placed photographs of existing subjects alongside constructed still lifes and abstractions, preventing the work from being organized simply according to whether or not it records an external reality^*22 Writing on The Curve, Adair Rounthwaite argues that documentary photography, Northern European still-life painting, and religious murals in Tehran enter the same body of work, making it impossible to contain the photographs neatly within either “Western art history” or “contemporary Iranian art”^*28That is more precise than simply calling the work multicultural. Shahbazi returns images made in Iran to Iranian sign-painting techniques, combines them with photographic forms learned in Europe, and places them in exhibitions alongside abstract studio photographs. Because Iranian sign painting, European photographic conventions, and studio abstraction occupy the same installations, no single cultural sphere can adequately organize the work. A 2017 retrospective at KINDL brought together about sixty works, showing black-and-white landscapes, still lifes, geometric abstractions, and documentary photographs without reducing them to chronology or one consistent style^*18 Galerie Peter Kilchmann’s artist page also records holdings at institutions including MoMA, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou, as well as an exhibition and photographic practice continuing into recent years^*23.