Exhibitions

Are we able to see poetry in chaos and suffering? After long months of pandemic and suffering, the lesson that Tahmineh gives us overwhelms us. Beyond the documentary photo, Tahmineh Monzavi’s pictures let us see a poetry, a softness hidden behind the hardness, a softness of sister and friend in front of the despair of these women. Echoing the work of her great predecessors, Boris Mikhailov and his shots of Russian society at the time of perestroika, Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression in the 1930s or even Nan Goldin, a direct witness to the years of drugs and AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, there is always a frame, a color, a moment of intimacy, a detail that sublimates the suffering and erases the unbearable. Tahmineh’s gaze restores dignity to these fragile and broken men and women that all society wishes to hide. Sentenced in 2012 to 150 lashes and imprisonment in Tehran for her photographs of Grape Alley, a shelter for women in danger, she nevertheless continues her work in Afghanistan, bearing witness to the stoning by the population of a rejected wife and to the resistance of Afghan women to exist despite social and religious pressure. Even in the heart of the Lut desert in central Iran, where a hellish sun raises the temperature above 70 degrees, she finds a feminine trace and her sun-damaged dunes and rocks take on the forms of lovers from an oriental harem. Tahmineh Monzavi’s pictures have always resonated with me as a specialist of Auguste Rodin’s work, whose masterpiece, the Gate of Hell with its 300 characters, the Damned of the Gate and their executioners, half human and half animal, asks us about the consequences of our actions and their weight at the time of the final judgment. Hell, hell on earth, hell in the afterlife. Moral hell. Hell for its women rejected by the Iranian society, Hell of the sun that destroys even the hardest stones. And yet there is always poetry in Tahmineh’s pictures.