A Journey to the Past at the City Photo Gallery - 2002-12-06

Have you ever seen or heard of a place where people take photos in the style of the Qajar era and participate in an exhibition, using a digital camera? This event has taken place at the City Photo Gallery in Tehran. The title of this exhibition, which is the twenty-seventh in the series of exhibitions at the City Photo Gallery, is 'A Journey to the Past' and it runs from December 2 to December 12. The photo gallery, or the Tehran Photo Museum, was opened in 1995 and the works displayed there have always had a flavor of the past. Perhaps such an operation from a photo museum is not so unexpected. The images in the 'A Journey to the Past' exhibition include 26 black and white photographs and one color piece, and the process of how they were created is a story worth telling. The City Photo Gallery is located next to the Bahar Shiraz Square in Tehran, within a small park. The gallery officials invited a number of children, teenagers, and adults who frequented the park next to the museum to come inside, dressed them in Qajar-era clothing - though not completely - and took photos in the gallery's studio, which is equipped with items from the past, using a digital camera. The photographs taken, which largely evoke the past, are notable not only because they were taken with a digital camera but also due to the clear contradictions in the subjects' clothing styles. For instance, in many images, we see children wearing Qajar-era coats and hats, yet they also sport trendy sneakers and jeans. In another example, a young man and woman pose for the camera, with the woman wearing a chador and a veil similar to Qajar women, although she has lifted her white veil. The man is dressed in complete Qajar attire, including a hat. In this image, the woman's thin, spaced eyebrows - unlike the thick, arched, and continuous eyebrows of Qajar women - and her long, manicured nails, along with the man's Swatch chronograph watch, draw significant attention. In one image, a young boy is seen riding a mountain bike, wearing jeans, sports shoes, and of course, Qajar clothing. The way the teenager sits on the bike and leans back, which contrasts with the behavior of Iranian teenagers in the past, is considered a strong point of this photo. Indeed, the 'A Journey to the Past' exhibition is strange and thought-provoking. Viewing some of the photos brings laughter, sometimes evokes emotion, and ultimately leads one to deep thought. This exhibition can be seen as a mirror held up to Iranian society; people caught between the limbo of tradition and modernism, belonging neither to the past nor to the present. I believe that using a digital camera for capturing the images in this exhibition was a very good strategy, as it emphasizes the encounter between tradition and modernism, this time from a technical and hardware perspective. What do you think?