Gohar Dashti

Gohar Dashti explores fraught social and political issues through the carefully staged photographs of her series "Iran, Untitled." By tightly clustering groups of people such as travelers or soldiers in the middle of a desert landscape, Dashti creates mysterious tableaus that suggest the isolation of specific populations within Iranian society. At the same time, she underscores the insularity of her select groups by providing one element that compositionally binds the people together, such as a bathtub, a rug or orange traffic cones. Dashti describes these images as haikus exploring the relationship between form and content. “It’s like objectifying a feeling; that is how an image reveals itself,” she explains. Ultimately, her work suggests the universal human need to bond with others, as well as the common urge to seek distance from the unfamiliar.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018