unguided tour

On June 20, 2009 Neda Agha-Soltan, a student at Teheran’s Islamic Azad University is shot by Iranian police on her way to join an antigovernment protest march. She is 26 years old. Someone films her dying on the street, and immediately uploads the video on Youtube making Neda Agha-Soltan the symbol of the student protests and a martyr for democratic reform in Iran.

On June 20, 2009 Neda Soltani, a lecturer of English literature at Teheran’s Islamic Azad University, is in her office revising a book manuscript. She does not join the protesters on their march. It doesn’t matter that Neda Soltani does not know Neda Agha-Soltan, the identities of the two women are about to merge.

Western media hungry for images need a face to go with the story — they find it on Neda Soltani’s facebook page. To our disinterested ears the names sound close enough. Why double check the spelling? It is the icon we’re interested in, who cares about the identity of the individual woman? CNN, BBC, CBS, ARD, ZDF, major newspapers — they all use Neda Soltani’s portrait. Sometimes her name is given with Neda Agha-Soltan’s image. For several weeks — until the government breaks down the opposition — Neda Soltani’s portrait can be seen on banners and posters mourning the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

Neda Soltani tries everything to reclaim her image. She calls TV stations and news channels, she writes follow-up emails and letters explaining the mix-up, demanding that her image be removed, stating over and over again that she is neither dead nor Neda Agha-Soltan. It’s too late, her image has become the face of a brutally crushed struggle for freedom.

Neda Soltani’s photograph has been circulating in the mass media and on social networking sites for over a week when the Iranian government pressures her to denounce the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan as a hoax instigated by the student protesters in conjunction with Western media. Frightened she flees the country for Germany where she seeks political asylum. Since her arrival in July Ms Soltani has been confined to a dismal refugee detention center waiting to be granted refugee status. No one has apologized to her.

To be robbed of one’s image can destroy a life. Neda Agha-Soltan’s publicized death and Neda Soltani’s loss of control over her image demonstrate how difficult it is for women to protect themselves from the intrusion + manipulation of Western media and their shameless consumers? We condemn the burkha as symbol and instrument of female oppression, we advocate the forced unveiling of Muslim women, we assume we alone know the truth. When will we explain to them we consider their naked faces our property?

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links

The New York Times reports on June 22, 2009 getting the facts right;

The Guardian reports on June 22, 2009 the death of Neda Soltani using Neda Agha-Soltan’s photograph;

An article in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung tells Neda Soltani’s story of how the ‘false’ image destroyed her life;

A Wikipedia entry on Neda Agha-Soltan’s death.

The primal screen is a Christian fantasma.
I must be careful not to impose it onto cultures which have incorporated their own religious beliefs, and which have developed ideas of the nature of woman as well as the function of visual images different from mine.

The Christian veil marks the beginning of the history of the primal screen. A history that is not over yet.

“Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at.” (John Berger)  The wish to see her naked — not as she would see herself but as he wants to see her. Nude. The convention of the female nude, unique to European art, presents a form of nakedness that reduces the lived diversity of women’s bodies to an idealized surface, a screen. The nude wears her nudity like a garment. A naked veil. A sight to be looked at by others and by herself. The female nude is never a mother.

The saturation of public spaces with images of the nude affect me. I begin to imitate the image. I have shed the veil long ago. Over the centuries layer after layer of clothing has disappeared. When in the 1960s the bikini becomes an acceptable form of dress, I have mastered the art of likening myself to the image of the nude. I rarely talk about this part of my history when I revile the Muslim woman’s veil.

Much pleasure & satisfaction can be found in turning myself into a sight. It makes me feel seductive & desirable, powerful, in control. But this should not lead me to conclude that the veiled Muslim woman lacks the freedom to experience pleasure. Her pleasures may be different from mine. It is that difference I perceive as a provocation to my hard-won freedom.

The veiled Muslim woman does not pretend she’s flat. There is a female body underneath the veil. A sexual body. It is this body I’m obsessed with, want to drag into the open, expose, defile. This is my wish: to reduce her to an image, a nude, a flat screen. Why? Because her presence forces me to acknowledge that not only am I less secular than I pretend to be, I am also not as free and liberated as I want to be.

Can you feel the aggression?
I don’t feel aggression. I feel envy.

When I shoot a photograph, I interrupt the continuity of visual experience. When I shoot at a photograph (or a mirror), I interrupt the illusion of depth. If you don’t believe me, take a look at André Kertész’s Broken Plate. (more…)

How did the primal screen enter art history?

Let’s assume I was an expert.

Among Baroque painters Johannes Vermeer is the undisputed master of the primal screen. His paintings are famous for creating a semblance of seamlessness, an impression of inviolable privacy. In his painting Vermeer banishes the notion of rupture, forbids the intrusion of an unwanted reality. What I admire most in Vermeer’s art is its evocation of the hymen, intact. (more…)

How does one fabricate the primal screen?
Let’s assume I was an apprentice.

Florence. While Piero della Francesca was working at the Madonna, Leon Battista Alberti introduced a new technology for viewing and representing the visible world, known as linear perspective. To achieve the projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane Alberti devised a viewing grid — “a thin veil, finely woven” — he called “Velum”, Latin for hymen. Perspectival images are produced with the hymen in mind. (more…)

Where does Veruschka come from?
Let’s assume the things I see  are for real.

From the French Riviera to a small village in Tuscany.

In the tiny museum of Monterchi there is a marvelous fresco of the Madonna del Parto (the Virgin of Parturition) that bears a striking resemblance to Veruschka. The fresco was created by Piero della Francesca in the second half of the fifteenth century for the medieval chapel opposite the museum. (more…)

Where do images come from?

Let’s assume the words I use are my own.

A revelation: Veruschka at the window. Underneath a black leather coat, loosely girded above the navel, her pale, silky skin is glowing from within, in stark contrast to the darkness surrounding her. Her face is blank.  She looks at me but does she see me? (more…)

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.“ (John Berger, Ways of Seeing) Why, then, “is it so hard for us to believe that our truths are often fantasies?” (Amy Bloom, Normal) Perhaps because we have learned to believe in the Truth of science. (more…)

“I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge. It is a mistake to associate Photography … with the notion of a dark passage (camera obscura). It is a camera lucida that we should say, … for the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy.” (Roland Barthes) (more…)

Memory is performative. To remember is to repeat.
Not every memory gets performed and repeated. Some memories are so horrific that we censor their re-presentation. Perpetrator memories of the Holocaust as sexual extravaganza belong to this group.

Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

(more…)