Who Are the People?
Homi K. Bhabha
Despite shifts in landscapes and locations, Mitra Tabrizian’s photographs have consistently posed an urgent question: Who are the people? This question is as troubling for politics as it is for photography. A dilemma about the nature of “the people” is often a sign of political crisis; who are the people echoes an edge of urgency, even emergency, amidst an alienated people who no longer conform to the normalising nomenclatures of state power. It is as if “the people” refuse to identify as “naturalised citizens” in both the legal and aesthetic sense of the phrase; they occupy an unheimlich social space that acknowledges their embedded sense of territorial location— urban, national, industrial, commercial—but leaves them bereft of any embodied locus of affiliation. The standing figure—isolated or assembled—is Tabrizian’s lietmotif of the collective experience of our contemporary lifeworld. Individuals standing apart, looking askance—mannequins of global neo-liberal capitalism—take up positions of an unnerving assembly-line anomie. This is often as tragically true of the realm of personal relations as it is of social association. The standing figure withstands; it plays the role of witness; it may or may not be a victim; and, at times, it emerges as an icon of hope and change, the bellwether of fellowship and solidarity.
In the sparse and elegant foyer of a large corporate-style building, the gnomes of the city (City, London, 2008) stand in a kind of marooned stasis. Who are these people? There is no direct answer to this question based on a reading of the mimetic content of the photograph; to identify them immediately by profession or class would be to state the obvious. The carefully staged artifice of photographic representation allows us to make a reading of the image: the distance from which the photograph is taken, the carefully constructed mise-en-scene, the intricate evasion of each other’s looks. For it is the problem of scale as it emerges within the work that trains the eye to recognise what may be the subject of this series. The anomic assembly of city gents is placed across the middle-distance of the rectangular space, roughly dividing the frame between a larger section that reaches to the horizon and a somewhat narrower section that represents the ground.
An anonymous assembly line of scripted, staged bodies occupy the visual space traditionally associated with a centred, primary object of perception. Centring the figure in this way gives visual stability, singularity and sovereignty to the “figure” of the artwork; it draws the sight lines together and creates a space for the cynosure of all eyes. But here, amidst the city gnomes, there is no singularity, no sovereignty. The assembly line of suited figures—almost all the same size and colour—are like exchangeable elements or equivalent units in a large corporate machine that treats them, insouciantly and instrumentally, as if they are mere commodities. Their anonymity signifies their standardisation and regulation. Are they waiting for interviews because the market is bullish? Or have they been sacked because it is bearish? We will never know. It is this line of precariousness that Tabrizian pursues in her reading of the disjunctions and displacements of global capital that have led, over the past few years, to recessions and volatilities for which nobody will take responsibility. Is the anonymity of corporate culture, signified in the middle-distance, the precondition that makes possible such a rank evasion of public responsibility?
Tabrizian draws her own line—a line of erasure—across such a visual tradition of the middle-distance and opens up other political and perceptual possibilities. Her innovation lies in turning this middle-distance—where the image emerges and the eye rests—into an unsettled zone of aesthetic representation that pointedly raises the question of the political recognition of “the people.” In series after series, right through this book, Tabrizian returns to the middle-distance to stand with groups with whom she identifies and to take a stand against forces of political tyranny or hegemony.
In Untitled (2009) a darkly clad posse of individuals gather in the middle- distance of a yet unpopulated section of Tehran. Amidst the tall white street- lamps waiting for streets still to be built, the black figures voice a kind of silent bodily resistance. In the absence of a democratic public sphere of dialogue and protest, they are internally exiled in a way specific to the condition of dissidents in Iran today. As Tabrizian writes about her own photographs:
Considering Iran’s present isolation, with people under pressure from both inside and outside, the work takes an unusual approach to the notion of ‘exile’: how people may feel exiled in their own country, without necessarily being politically involved.
In Another Country (2010), the middle-distance is variously occupied by a line of dark-veiled girls standing in front of a London mosque; a group of young men “at home“ in a Middle-Eastern café; and Islamicised gravestones in a migrant graveyard. Each time the anomie and anonymity of the migrant—despite multiculturalism’s formal concessions to the civic diversity of “community” life—creates an enclave of exclusion in the midst of the cosmopolitanism of Western European urban life.
These explorations of the middle-distance of the photograph, from the perspective of the minority, exude an anxiety about time—about the time that is ours, but always seems to exceed our actions and intentions. This argument about time as anxiety is visible in the bodily posture of the people—an eerie stillness, a mordant monumentality, a kind of stiffness of the half-dead. Such stillness is perhaps Tabrizian’s most frequent allegorical gesture; that reaches out, as allegory often does, to the problems of the present from the predicaments of the past. Allegory, if it is about anything, it is about the representation of peoples and things in transition. Stillness, in the allegory of Tabrizian’s photography, is about states of transition that may not as yet be visible, or knowable, but stir beneath the skin.
The precariousness of the assembly-line city functionaries is a case in point: are they about to become part of the Mammon machine or have they just been spat out by it? In either case, they are caught in a moment of transition. And the students who stand, or the migrants who wait? Their stillness must not be mistaken for stasis. They are waiting for something to happen; or they are the agents of what is about to happen. Tabrizian brings us to the edge of agency and let’s us complete the picture. She asks us to read the “end” of her photographs by summoning up what we know of the world and what we, in escaping our knowledge, sustains our hopes and aspirations for the world and its peoples. This half-dead, spectral stillness is also half-alive, about to take the next step, the next leap, just as Tabrizian is about to take the next photograph. Somewhere between this moment and the next, history happens. And the photograph, as Walter Benjamin once wrote, records both the “here and now” and the “immediacy of that long- forgotten moment [in which] the future subsists...” 1
1. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” One-Way Street (London: Verso, 1979) 243.