Chicago, IL
What can a photograph really tell us about the people and the places delimited by its frame? If we no longer believe that the camera offers a window on a particular truth, nevertheless we continue to hope that in the accumulation of images, even sometimes in between them, others sorts of truths might be revealed. An ongoing portfolio of black and white pictures by the Iranian photographer Sara Abbaspour offers emblematically more than a simple description of its subjects: a boy twisting at a roadside, a young woman and her mother in the mirror, two women perched moodily on a rooftop at night, an empty lot, a boy lying across a sofa back, shadows at the top of a set of stairs, the bottom half of men sitting in a living room, forlorn women on a bus. Shot in the artist’s home country of Iran, the images taken individually are many of them quite poignant, but they mostly seem unrelated. Abbaspour, however, puts great faith in sequencing, and considered one after the other her photographs begin to tell stories about who can do what where, what we feel indoors and out, where we go and where we come from. Indeed, the very name of her series points to the importance of order and connections: ingenuously titled “II,” it begs the questions, what was “I” and will there be a “III?”
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 7:17 PM