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| We first encountered Olivia Arthur's work when her series The Middle Distance won the 2007 Inge Morath Award, which is presented annually by Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation. In that series, Arthur worked on both sides of the geopolitical borderline between East and West - in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia, for example - to document the lives of women in different cultures. We were initially drawn to Arthur's work by her understated sensitivity to color, but it was the way that she captured and gave meaning to the seemingly silent moments in her subjects' lives that held our interest. In The Middle Distance, which combines a traditional documentary framework with a narrative of personal quest and discovery, Arthur's relationship to her subjects appears to be constantly shifting. At one moment she is distant and objective, providing context, and at the next moment she is up close and subjective, an unseen but undeniable presence within her own documents. The combination of visual understatement with a shifting relationship between photographer and subject in The Middle Distance suggests Arthur's familiarity with the work of her Magnum colleague Alec Soth and, from an historical perspective, Walker Evans, both of whose serial portraiture makes extensive use of environmental imagery. In her more recent work, Iran: Beyond the Veil, Arthur abandons those influences, challenging herself and her viewers to see beyond the social and photographic conventions of representation of Iranian women. In this work, which is closely related to her earlier project, Arthur is responding to both the popular media and to the work of such photographers as Abbas and Gilles Peress, whose photographs of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 have contributed so significantly to our knowledge of contemporary Iran. At issue is perception itself, and the degree to which our encounters with a culture such as Iran is, as Western viewers, largely shaped by the employment of those conventions in the media. The veil, a social custom in many Muslim cultures, is employed within the Western media as a symbol of oppression, much as the keffiyeh is employed to represent terrorism. In either case, the symbol is a construct; its meaning is grounded in the fear or ignorance of the viewer towards whom its use is directed. All possibility of an individual inner life behind the veil and, by extension, all possibility of intentionality within the cultures where it is customary, is drained from such symbol laden media images. By specifically focusing upon the inner lives of her subjects in this work, and consequently moving more overtly towards portraiture, Arthur works against such simple constructions. Even the counter-story of an Iranian women's parallel culture behind closed doors, so eloquently described in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, is defused by Arthur's photographs of women enacting gestures of self-identification, both indoors and out, both veiled and unveiled. The chador, like the Iranian carpet against which it is seen in one of her portraits, is recognized as a malleable symbol of personal self-expression as well as of political oppression. In recognizing and representing this, Arthur is suggesting that it is the stereotypes of media, and their perpetuation through the medium of photography in particular, which constitute a pernicious, impenetrable veil between cultures, beyond which we must look for true knowledge, understanding, and exchange. Noriko Fuku, Kyoto University of Art and Design John Jacob, Inge Morath Foundation |
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