Obtuse Meaning and An Economy of Excess:
Reading (in) Detail in Melika Shafahi’s Photographs
Foad Torshizi *
“This text has been originally written to accompany the present series by Melika Shafahi published in Gwangju Biennale’s catalog and is reproduced in parkingallery.com with the permission of the author. It cannot be copied, reproduced, or used in any way without the author’s permission. Please do not cite or circulate this reproduction.”
The series of untitled staged photographs by Melika Shafahi, with their painstaking attentiveness to costume design and makeup, present an atmosphere that mimics the very mechanisms deployed in fashion photography to fabricate desire and perpetuate commodity culture. These strategies of mimicry involve highlighting sculpted bodies, glamorous costumes, and makeup in order to produce conventional ideals of physical and sartorial beauty. However, Shafahi’s imitation of fashion photography does not suggest her desire to attain the status of this genre. Instead, through the use of trivial visual elements that are vexingly out of place (e.g. a ketchup bottle or a propane container), her photographs provoke a feeling of incongruity with conventional standards of fashion. In this sense, her photographs exemplify John Tagg’s broader observation about photography and meaning: “[...] the picture is always too little or too large—obdurately saying less than is wanted and more than is wished” (Tagg, 2009: xxxvi). Melika Shafahi’s photographs fail to fully emulate fashion photography, but it is precisely in this failure, which I call intentional, that her photographs say “more than is wished” in fashion photography. Shafahi’s untitled series, leaves an unsewn tear on its own fabric, which she playfully protects them from seamlessness and finish that are vital to fashion photography.
These tears, however, only appear when we read these pictures intimately, only when we read them up-close, when we physically remove the space between these two-dimensional objects and us in order to build a passionate relationship between our bodies and the photographs. It is only through this physically intimate relation that our eyes are opened to her photographs’ intentional failure as fashion photography and its rubric of enforced perfection. The proximity of our bodies to the photographs also grants us an ability to read intimately, to read in detail. The significance of an intimate reading of details is not only limited to the value of methodological heterogeneity that affords us a perspective that openly accepts the tendency in photography to slip away from the hands of disciplinary knowledge production, but also leads us to a diverse economy of marginal implications, often violently obscured by the predominance of a single central meaning. Naomi Schor, the American literary critic and theorist, writes that photographic detail, as discussed by Roland Barthes, “is marked [...] by its participation in an economy of excess. It always enjoys the status of supplement, a luxurious extra. [...] the detail which draws and holds Barthes’ attention is like the fetishist’s fetish, a detail which, camouflaged by its perfect banality, goes unnoticed by others” (Schor, 1987: 91).
It strikes me how the terms camouflage and fetish in the statement by Schor resonate with the visuals in Shafahi’s untitleds.
It is only through these minuscule details that we can foster an engagement with her photographs that allows us to change our perspective and let her work become something different. These details, however minute, perform effectively enough to be able to create anomalies: an uncomfortable toe, hiding under the sharp edges of a coffee table; a propane container, a hose attached to it, and an unlit rope creating an accidental and unintended shape on the ground; a plastic ketchup bottle; and finally, a nettlesome shadow on the walls of a decaying background, all of which emerge as a menace to fashion’s obsession with perfection. This supplementary, decentered, and marginal economy of excess serves as our very luxurious clues to interpret one significant meaning of her work: a deliberate failure to pass for fashion photography. Although her models might easily appear in Vogue or in Harper’s Bazaar, she playfully creates these anomalies in order to tell us that her photographs will not fit. Shafahi leaves us hints to realize that her work is never enough or as Tagg puts it is “obdurately saying less than is wanted”; that it never fulfills our desire to articulate its meaning; that it does not allow us to identify the photographs as fashion photography; and that they slip, no matter how hard we try to grasp them.
Then there is another playful failure: Shafahi fails to meet the vexing standards and expectations of Middle Eastern artists. She is an Iranian artist living in France: a wonderful combination that fits into disturbing categorizations of Western galleries and museums, hysterically hunting for any work that will echo a problematic vocabulary comprised of terms such as the Middle East, female artist, exile, the Diaspora, plight of women and so forth. But her work does not exhibit the famous dark veil, nor does it perpetuate the stereotype of victimized and voiceless Iranian women. The tenuous, though intentional and self-reflexive, Persian calligraphic inscription on the bodies of her models speaks to this failure. She oscillates between gestures of exoticization and expressions of envy for a mode of representation, from which Iranian women have been excluded from via a homogenizing force that camouflages them under the dark veil. Notwithstanding the latent possibilities to be misconstrued as either, she deliberately fails to present any of them. But she does not fail to remind us, obstinately, of our own failure to pin down “the meaning” in her works. She leaves us subtle inklings to the tension at the heart of the failed pursuit of the subjectivities constructed in her photographs and to fit into a Western subject position that creates, consumes, and controls fashion. It is through this obscure meaning that Shafahi’s works surpass the limits of fashion photography, dismantle its desire machine, unsettle the very mechanisms of fabrication of subjectivity, and perform effectively as a critique of identity politics in the time of a globalized world.
*Foad Torshizi is a doctoral student of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Amirali Mohebbinejad
Arash Khosronejad
Bijan Moosavi
Erfan Abdi
Farid Jafari
Hamed Sahihi
Leila Ghafarian
Samira Eskandarfar
Shirin Sabahi
Mooweex
newbookz
Parking News
Police Disco Light
Sazmanab Project
Silk Screen Studio : Dara
The contraimage
Urban Jealousy
Behrad Javanbakht
Behrouz Hariri
Farhad Fozouni
Rang Magazine
Shahab Tondar
Akkasee
Reloading Images
The Exopalasht