Deeply marked by the Iran-Iraq war (1980\u201388), the younger generation of Iranian photographers often returns to that reality, which has had a profound impact on Iranian society. Gohar Dashti tackles the subject explicitly in Today\u2019s Life and War<\/em> (2008). Yet her images go beyond references to a specific event, providing a clear illustration of the shift that occurs between the attempt to preserve day-to-day life in wartime and the \u201cday-to-day becoming\u201d of conflict. Her photographs revolve around the contrast between the staging of a young couple\u2019s routine \u2014 meals, TV, newspapers \u2014 and a scenography of war made of armoured vehicles, soldiers, and sandbag shelters. The formal declensions of photography take the representation of war, conventionally associated with photojournalism, toward a more conceptual and symbolic dimension made of disjunctions and discrepancies between the subject and the setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the series Iran, Untitled<\/em> (2013) and Stateless<\/em> (2014\u201315), set in an inhospitable desert environment, Dashti pushes her visual search toward still more abstract and minimalist forms. Here, she tackles the suffering, precariousness, and displacement of populations impacted by conflicts. To represent mourning, Dashti returns to the traditional iconography of \u201cpity\u201d and entrusts the lifeless body of a young man to the arms of a darkly silhouetted veiled woman. The sculptural dimension, however, shifts from the subject to the surrounding landscape, reinforcing the dramatic tone of the image. Similarly, the desert metaphorically supports the theme of departure and wandering already suggested by travellers with suitcases lined up for an imaginary plane (or place). Again, the essentiality of the visual accords with the aridity of the place and reinforces the theatrical and paradoxical nature of these images, whose purpose is less to represent a reality than to perform it. Dashti thus goes beyond the \u201cpictorial\u201d nature of the photographic image; enriching it with the symbolism of gesture, she makes the drama of conflict a reality that is not only represented, but above all embodied. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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