Unfinished Business, interview by Roberta McGrath, Source Magazine, issue 101, June 2020

Mitra, let’s begin with the art world. You treat it with a certain amount of healthy cynicism. You’ve described making art as ‘a glamorous hobby’, ‘a bit of an indulgence’, and art as increasingly little more than ‘aesthetic harassment’! You obviously dislike what you perceive as the overvaluation or idealisation of both art and artists, but you’ve also exhibited for over thirty years (you have a gallery in NY) and so you are in that world even if at the same time you refuse to be of it. Can you say a little more about this? How do you view your place within it?

With ambivalence! I appreciate good art, but not the hype about the artist. And it's tricky, because if you make work, you need to show it – otherwise there’s no point. But it takes a lot of time and effort to find a gallery genuinely interested in art (rather than just the market and how to sell you as the artist). I’ve never really been successful in the private sector as I would rather spend my time making work than ‘networking’, meeting the ‘right people’ or appearing in the ‘right openings’ etc. It’s just not in my character! And you can’t abandon the art world altogether, unless you stop making work,  hence the dilemma! But luckily museums seem interested and that’s really where I’d like to be. Incidentally, art as ‘aesthetic harassment’ is from the French philosopher Baudrillard that I used in an introduction to Beyond the Limits.

Is it to do with the kind of dialogue that is possible in the public, rather than private, sphere?

Yes, it’s also that museums are more interested in political work or work dealing with social issues.

Is it also that the process of making work matters to you? I mean sure you’ve got to have an outcome ‘the work’, but ‘how’ rather than ‘what’, seems uncommonly important to you. Can you tell Source a bit about your working methods, perhaps, for example, in commissions?

Working methods vary depending on the subject and commission.  When I did the recent commission for Art on the Underground, You don’t know what nights are like? (2016 –18), initially as a ‘response’ to the launch of night trains, it gave me the opportunity to focus on night-time workers, most of whom are in low paid jobs – and 70% are migrants. They run the infrastructure of the city and yet remain invisible, and ‘we’ are still trying to get rid of ‘them’! So I mainly focused on the text, i.e. on the voice of the volunteers, to get the sense of what it’s like to work at night and the impact on their lives.  The result was three x10 metre billboards, two images and one text, but I only used one of the participants in the picture. This was to adopt a more abstract approach, rather than the usual shots of people and their voice. I selected a woman who had worked night shifts in security for 16 years, the last twelve at Tate Modern. You can imagine how that might affect your life. When she saw her picture on a 10 metre billboard at Southwark station (one of the stations that takes you to the Tate) she was in tears. “All these years I’ve been invisible” she said, “and now my photograph is on a billboard in the centre of the city!”  I thought, well maybe art can be beneficial to others and not just artists. 

So the process of listening to, having an ear to the ground, rather than looking at, and of collaboration, obviously matters to you. From the start of your career you’ve also worked collaboratively with colleagues. Unlike in film, this is still fairly unusual in photography. I’m struck that in your latest book off screen (2019) the short essays (by Parveen Adams, David Bate and Olivier Richon) are not simply about framing your work, but are texts/mediations that lie somewhere between your work and the work of the authors. Collaboration is clearly important to you.

I enjoy and value collaborations, especially if the project is ambitious – as the projects often are.  And I have worked with some very talented photographers/artists – Zadoc Nava, Andy Golding, Alan Harris and Dennis Tuffnell, to name a few – and also with writers as you mentioned.  I’ve learned a lot, and without their contributions I wouldn’t be able to get satisfactory results.

But surely it’s more than that?

Collaboration can be one way of dismantling the myth about the individual/ artist being the sole ‘visionary’. Others can bring something else into the work, which could be very exciting – you can learn a lot about your work.

Your approach seems to brush against the‘competitive’, neo-liberal grain. Photography has come to ‘matter as art as never before’ so many photographers perceive themselves as ‘artists’ rather than photographers, and galleries promote them as such: The market demands a ‘singular’ author as the point of origin of an original artwork and this must be preserved (although an original photograph really makes no sense when it comes to photography which is, after all, a mass reproducible medium). Photography has gone ‘beyond the limits’.  In your book of that title (2004) there’s an image of an art gallery opening. You employed ‘real’ subjects, those in and of the art world, to pose and become the networked ‘objects’. The art here is literally immaterial – it has vanished and nobody notices or even cares. Is the image a commentary on how art has become a business just like any other?

Yes, to some extent! For the series Beyond the Limits (made in 2000) I was very much inspired by Baudrillard’s analysis of the ‘crisis of contemporary culture’. His theory that we were moving towards a world where the basic axioms of each system were pushed to the point that they produced the opposite effects from those intended. That was his concept then – in a sense ‘predicting’ what’s happening now!  In this image I mixed actors with non actors; the actors knew how to act and the non actors didn’t, a reference to ‘networking’ in the art world (some are better at it than others) performed to the extent that art has gone out of the window, i.e. what is important is the ‘art of persuasion’, how to sell, rather than art itself!

You left Iran in 1977, two years before the Islamic revolution that deposed the Shah and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. The late 1970s and 1980s were key for the development of a number of critical theories in the West (informed by marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis), along with the rise of Western neoliberalism. How did your own experience, and these debates – the condition of postmodernity – shape your practice?

I studied under Victor Burgin at The Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster) in the early/mid 1980s. When I joined the course I was taking photographs of the people in south of Tehran who lived in poor conditions, some didn’t even have drinking water, and this was not some remote area in Iran, but in the capital of a rich country! Then I thought now what? These images don’t really help us to understand the subject or their conditions etc. (following Brecht). The course was hugely influential in thinking photography and introducing critical theory and, importantly, in situating photography in relation to other aspects of culture. Photography could not and cannot be understood in isolation.

This makes sense of your early work that provided a critique of the hollow men (and women), the living dead of late capital’s corporate culture in the City of London. However, your later work gives voice to entire under-represented classes – whether in Iran or here – and tells much smaller, quotidian stories (rather than dealing with ‘grand narratives’).

I’ve always been interested in the ‘under-represented’, and social divide, whether the participants in Tehran (2006), in low paid jobs, or the ex-factory workers in Leicestershire (2012) or indeed the very early documentary work. The later works, as you point out, do focus on ‘smaller, quotidian stories’, but allegorically allude to bigger issues. 

Your series Border (2005–2006) about Iranians in exile lies somewhere in between East and West. ‘The Long Wait’, for example, is a striking image. The woman is the only person in the series who has neither name nor story. It is a resolute, melancholic, photograph. Can you tell us more about the image?

‘The Long Wait’ is a tragic story but the woman (the first volunteer) decided to withdraw her story, when it came to wider exposure. I respected her wish. I respect her. And although it’s a melancholic, photograph, she is a survivor with admirable strength, evident in her untold story. Like the others in this series, these images indicate a sense of displacement and loss – the stories convey the complexity and diversity of people’s experiences and attitudes and indicate an enormous resilience, resistance, and ‘undefeated-ness’, far from the victimization often attributed to exiles.

In other Iranian images, disconnected, perhaps isolated people seem to inhabit wastelands; characters stand unsteadily on topsoil (the past we feel has decomposed, the future yet to built). There are no firm roots in these uncanny non-places. On the edge state surveillance is visible.  This suggests that history and memory are important in your images. 

I’m interested in the idea of ‘non communication’/‘disconnectedness’ as a way of signifying alienation, which seems to be an effect of a specific social organization – it’s not life in general that is meaningless, i.e. the alienation of existentialism, but this particular form of social life. For instance Tehran (2006) was set against economic sanction and threat of war imposed by Bush’s administration, indicating Iran’s isolation – and the sense of ‘alienation’ felt by Iranians under pressure from inside and outside. This work is more relevant now considering Trump’s policy of crippling Iran’s economy, as well as the current internal crisis!

It also seems to me that your characters are testaments to a kind of determined refusal to be sexualized and racialised subjects, to be marginalized or excluded despite their isolation, hardship, loss of status etc. whether there or here. This thread runs all the way through to your recent feature film Gholam (2018) set in London in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Gholam was inspired by one of the people I met while making the Border series.  It tells the story of an enigmatic and charismatic Iranian cab driver, who doesn’t like to talk about his past, doesn’t care about his future, doesn’t commit to anything. Yet still gets involved in the conflict of a total stranger and carries it through to the end, regardless of the consequences. Despite the lack of commitment and apparent ‘indifference’, he appears to be the most principled character. He risks his life for a stranger without wanting anything in return, neither reward or recognition – which is very much against the ethos of the present with its emphasis on competition, individual achievement, recognition, the anxiety associated with the lack of it, and the wholesale devaluation of those who fail to ‘achieve’. 

Who is a friend, and who an enemy, is not always clear in the film – even in the last instance. What happens ‘off screen’ beyond ‘the’ limits, or on the ‘border’ of the frame plays a large part in the narrative. It’s a film marked as much by silence, by the unsaid and the unseen, although I think this is true of all your work.  Also, your images have become increasingly more naturalistic (unlike your earlier work where images were very much staged tableaux or panoramas that clearly emphasized the constructed-ness of the photographic image). What prompted this shift?  Is it a kind of refusal of the either/or of documentary/ art, to refuse both and deny neither – to stand your ground between camps, between countries – between photography and film?

As I mentioned, I started with documentary photography and returned to it later, ‘reworking’ the genre, i.e. taking a particular subject and asking volunteers to ‘play themselves’ whether exiles in Border (2005–6), or bankers in City, London (2008), or Muslim community in Another Country (2010) or ex–factory workers in Leicestershire (2012). There is something interesting about re-enactment. Whereas in the past I mixed actors and non–actors to address a particular issue, from 2005 onwards I increasingly felt its important that the ‘actual people’ participate in a project that affects them. I assume it is kind of a “rejection of the either/or of documentary/ art”. I never thought about it this way, but it makes sense.

But with regard to your first point, and what happens off screen, film stills (2017/18) was inspired by Gholam. Here I wanted to deviate from the usual approach. The work uses the real locations of the film, yet focuses on the rejected cast, or the extras, or depicts the empty landscapes, with an implication of narrative.  In this respect the images also differ from the usual film stills, which often portray the main character(s) – and are rarely devoid of people. Throughout the film, the main character remains an enigma. So in these stills, he is not replaced/represented by any of the rejected cast, a strategy used to maintain and enhance the mystery, echoing the film. The only indication is his whereabouts – the places he’s been, or heading to – or the hidden danger that awaits in these deserted landscapes, alluding to the ‘out-of-frame’.

Your commissioned work Leicestershire (2012), perhaps the work closest to documentary, is set in the deserted landscape and of a post–industrial, broken–down Britain. Nineteenth-century factories that had lasted for over a hundred years are boarded up, their windows smashed, crumbling buildings are pitiful shells – but immigrants are still here, surviving in an old country, the ‘shires’ of England. You seem to have the ability to make buildings (and other inanimate objects) speak! How did you come to make this work?

Leicestershire was initially commissioned by University of Loughborough as a billboard project, but after some research into the history of the region I got very interested in the city of Leicester and decided to expand the project. After World War II, the British government encouraged immigration to the country to tackle the economic crisis. A large number of those immigrants settled in Leicester, then a centre for manufacturing shoes and textiles, and as a result immigrant groups are now nearly half the city's total population. 

I tracked down some of the ex-factory workers now living with very little pension, and with their children jobless.  Set against the derelict and disused factories of Leicester and Loughborough, I started the project as an attempt at an historical ‘documentation’ and tribute to the forgotten citizens who helped build what were once major industrial cities and ended up with a series of images that raised more questions than answers.  The landscape signifies ‘abandonment’. Is this an image of once useful workers now abandoned by the city? Or, is this a portrayal of ‘disillusionment’ as the migrant’s journey is, above all, to seek a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children? Or is this the depiction of ‘exile’ within? In the absence of a democratic public sphere of dialogue and protest, they are internally ‘exiled’ in a way specific to the condition of migrants? (As Stuart Hall reminds us, “migration is a one way trip”). Or, is this the end of an era? As Gilles Deleuze put it “capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World..… It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts…. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold, or marketed”.  So, the question is what do these images mean in a globalized world of cultural diversity dominated by the profit motive and uncertainty? 

Speaking of the profit motive and about the absence of a democratic public sphere of dialogue and protest, can we talk briefly about HE and your role as a teacher (I notice you don’t describe yourself as Professor or lecturer).

I’ve always preferred ‘teacher’ (to any of the other descriptions). That’s what you do: ‘teach’!  I think it's very important politically to introduce/encourage critical thinking. Teachers can be extremely important and influential, as Victor Burgin was for the majority of us who studied with him. 

I’m also thinking of your work Looking Back (2012) which gives voice to the intergenerational deficit of young, unemployed women and men (students?), a ‘lost’ generation who return a gaze that is both perplexed and as flat as the screen they look at, even if somewhat countered by their testimonies and tales of survival. Do you see them as exiles too?

Looking back was made in 2012 (exhibited 2013). Young people were among the hardest hit by the economic recession of 2008. I was interested in the unemployed or those who despite university education couldn’t get a job in the area of their expertise and had to take any job to survive. 

And students now? To return to the question of the importance critical thinking, as we discussed you are part of a generation of photographers who benefited from the emergence of a critical photographic practice that was theoretically informed and that radically challenged traditional understandings of the medium. But we are living through a period of debt–financed education, ‘post–theoretical malaise’, and growing anti–intellectualism. Critical thinking is no longer high on the agenda. What do you make of this?

The downgrading of critical thought is a real loss – especially given the complexities of the present. 

We’re at the end Mitra and we didn’t get to talk about the cat in Gholam that understands Farsi!