Simin’s interview
The text to appear on Simin Soroush’s photograph as similar to other texts is in two sections. One, her monologue tone speaking with the viewer, and the second my views as the critique writing about her. In this way, the visual art, the artist’s view, and the criticism all unite in one single form of expression.
Simin’s photographs are the result of her striving to manifest the mystical moment that she envisions. The photographs are products of her internal voice and what she sees before her eyes. Simin is a seeker of the divine energy that envelopes human existence. In her photographs this force is manifested as dome shapes that enclose monumentally tiny human shapes. At first glance Simin’s photographs echo the National Geographic representations of other cultures. But there is one fundamental difference: the image of other becomes the self in her photographs. For example, she dignifies the underage child laborer who toils without respite, or she leaves the viewer mesmerized by the praying pose of a girl. The internal and external become united as Simin finds herself recording the unification.
(Simin’s monologue will have the quotations without mentioning her name as third person) :
I photograph to live. Art is an internal voice that moves my existence. Photography gives voice to my passion. After struggling for years to find a substitute for my lost ability to sing, one day I came by a branch of flowers surrounded by thorns and I felt compelled to photograph it. That was the beginning of my marriage with photography.
I search for exotic images because I discover myself in them. That is why I seek opportunities to travel overseas and photograph others. I am stimulated by challenge of bridging the barrier of culture in the precious little time of my visit. I work with my participants as a stranger in their land and become friends with them so they let me freeze their shadow on my hearth.
When I photographed a poor musician who plays for a living, I swept the dirt away from him, polished him, glorified him for his dignity and froze a dimension of him on my photograph. This image is for me to keep and to share as we remember each other.
My photographs are self-portraits of another kind. Residing within a different culture for the second part of my life, I have learned to assimilate, to adopt, and to find a balance between my past and present, between my Iranian roots of close family ties and hospitality, versus my American ideals of modernity and independence.
Throughout this process, I became the stranger who has left pieces of her soul with humanity at large, especially with those who happened to be living in underprivileged societies; those who have not had the means to get out or are not willing to do so. So every once in a while, I must pack up and search for those with whom I share the pain and the anguish that I had felt while living in Iran. I have learned to keep that past alive, to come back to it and to cherish what it was.
I know I am a tourist. Inevitably a woman with pack of cameras and other equipment rushing through deserted areas has to be a tourist coming from the first world to see the exotics of the third world. But as I once broke the stereotype that traditional Iranian society dictated to me I think that I can also break the other stereotype that defines me as a tourist. |
