“We construct history through photographs. They shape it for us”, says Bahman Jalali.
Not only has the Iranian photographer Bahman Jalali had a decisive part to play in the writing of Iran’s visual history, he has also – through his commitment as a publicist, historian, communicator and teacher – made an essential contribution to the social acceptance of photography in his country as a medium of artistic expression. For reasons that are primarily bound up with the more recent history of his country and, by the same token, with the limited possibilities of exhibiting abroad, and also with the Western World’s limited reception of art of non-Western provenance, his exemplary oeuvre, which is the product of the last forty years, is little known beyond the frontiers of his native Iran. It was not until 2007 that the extraordinary breadth of Jalali’s oeuvre could be shown in his first retrospective at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, an oeuvre that first drew the attention of the outside world to Jalali’s concern with the artistic, historical, political and social problems of his country.
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aus: WAR SLIDE SHOW. Khorramshar. A City that was Destroyed, 1981, b/w slide show © Bahman Jalali, 2007
A methodological characteristic of Bahman Jalali’s work in photography is his preference for pictorial essays, the production of which often takes years, even decades, and for which the book represents the ideal means of publication and presentation. His thematic projects deal, for example, with the circumstances of the fishermen of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea in the context of ecological and economic change, but he also documents the internationally renowned architecture of the Iranian desert cities and has, ever since 1974 and right up until the most recent past, been recording the decay of the historical centre of the port city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. He has also worked with historical photographs dating from 19th century Persia (which he collects both for his own photography museum, the Cultural Research Bureau, which serves as a publication/organization base, and for his work as a teacher), the purpose being, as he himself says, to keep alive the knowledge and understanding of history in his work.
For his photographs of the Iran-Iraq war, Bahman Jalali visited the border town of Khorramshahr almost forty times between the years of 1980 and 1988, documenting the disaster of war and the plight of the civilian population. The Iranian Revolution, on the other hand, was photographed in Tehran from beginning to end, from 10th December 1978, the day of the first major demonstration against the Shah, until 11th February 1979, the day on which the Iranian army retreated and the Shah’s regime was toppled.
A socio-politically significant aspect of Bahman Jalali’s work – especially that of his photographs documenting the Iran-Iraq war and the Revolution – is the fact that he realizes his projects entirely of his own accord and on his own account, as a civilian and without any intention of commercal exploitation. His photographs are – for him and hence for his public, too – the object of, and reflection upon, artistic, historical and social facts. Bahman Jalali’s clear standpoint and uncompromising oeuvre together show most impressively what the energy and political perspicacity of a single individual can do for the collective memory of a nation. This oeuvre is of significance first and foremost for his own country, but also, and to no less an extent, for us, the “distant observers”, whose view of things is obstructed by the images and information with which the media confront us day in day out.
Christine Frisinghelli
On behalf of the Jury