Shifting visions
It is only after their formal beauty has left its mark that you realise the narrative power of Abbas' photographs, writes Sonali Pahwa
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An Abbas photograph of the first anniversary of the revolution, Tehran, 11 February, 1980 and below, Abbas at work
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Abbas, Iranian-born photographer and a member of the Magnum collective, strikes a precise balance between the terms compounded in the name of his profession -- photojournalism. His books confront massive social realities -- the Iranian Revolution, Christian resurgence, militant Islam -- with an aesthetic virtuosity that reveals their most telling details.
Abbas' best-known pictures are of the Iranian Revolution, and he chose to present these at the Townhouse gallery last week together with more recent pictures of the country to which he returned after a long, self-imposed exile in 1997. His commentary is minimal -- he prefers to let the photographs speak for themselves. But, as he later reveals, the selection and sequence of pictures are effective ways of building a visual narrative that conveys the story the photographs suggest to him.
"Photographs can be seen in many different ways," he elaborates, "and people will always react to them differently. This variety of views is enriching for me as a photographer. But I want to make sure that you get my point too. In addition to the visual narrative it is sometimes also necessary to add text, especially in documentary photography. I preface my books by writing about my travels and my state of mind as I took the pictures. This is why my last book is titled Iran Diary 1971-2002."
"I was involved with the revolution in Iran. It was my revolution, even if I later decided that I didn't believe in it," says Abbas as he displays the pictures through which he will narrate his initial, studiously inclusive documentation of the revolution, and then his disillusionment with it. The early pictures of crowds in the streets reveal the massive popular base of the uprising as well as haunting moments of brutality amid the euphoria.
"Although I supported the revolution I wanted to capture its full span, including the violence," he notes. And he can pinpoint the photograph, of an executed former general, which marked the moment when he no longer claimed the revolution as his own.
The pictures of Iran in the late 1990s have a quieter, more reflective tone. "When there is a revolution all you have to do is to go into the streets," Abbas explains, "even though I would emphasise that Iran's revolution was a cultural as well as a social and political one. Today, the photographer's perspective must be different because the revolution is happening mostly in people's minds. My focus has been on women, youth and artists, because I believe they are the vanguard of the current revolution."
"When it became harder to work as a photographer in Iran, around 1980, I decided to leave. I knew that the wave of revolution would not stop at the borders of Iran and I wanted to travel more widely in the Islamic world, particularly in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. But I was not emotionally ready for this just yet. I also felt that I had to develop a new photographic language. Events in Iran had been so overpowering that you recorded them as they happened, and sometimes anticipated them. Therefore, I had a straight photojournalistic language. But I knew I needed something else for my intended work on Islam in different countries. So I went to Mexico for three years, of which I spent one year just travelling around, developing a language of photography when nothing was happening. Then, when I began my project on Islam in 1987, in Cairo, I could just walk down the street and find that everything was happening there. In order to see, you have to be ready to see. You need to have the code to interpret what is happening before you."
Abbas has woven many such visual codes into a style that identifies the photographs as his whether they are from Cuba or Afghanistan or the Philippines. Perhaps the most distinctive examples are found in two books on world religions: the first, Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam, is an epic volume of pictures of Muslims who are not usually the focus of the media's attention. For the most part his subjects are non-Arabs. Abbas travelled to Afghanistan, China and Indonesia, to Muslim communities in Europe and the war zone of Kashmir, capturing offbeat images. A similarly idiosyncratic vision is revealed in Voyage en Chrétientés. Beginning in Jerusalem and fanning out through Upper Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, the US, Cuba and beyond, Abbas records visits to churches, exorcism rituals, right-wing Christian rallies, a panoply of images of public demonstrations of faith. Here, too, his inclination to enter into war zones is evident. There are photographs of individuals besieged by inter- confessional strife in Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. The pictures are dense with details of the distinctive social lives of those who profess the faith.
"I am not interested in religion as faith," Abbas asserts. "A person's relation with God is not my problem. What I am interested in is how religion affects societies -- politically, socially and economically. The more public face of religion is also more visual."
Abbas' next book will also deal with religion, in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq and the southern US. "The present project is centered on how people are increasingly defining their identity by religion, and how religion is becoming more social and public," he explains. "Many conflicts of a tribal, national or ideological nature are now perceived in terms of religion. For example, the conflict of Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms is often framed as a conflict of religions."
If the millennial rise of religiosity has given Abbas' photography a new inflection, so has the development of camera technology since the beginning of his career as a photojournalist. The media coverage of the first war he photographed, in Bangladesh in 1971, is a revelatory example of the contrast between then and now.
"There were perhaps three major television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, together with a French and a Japanese network. And only four foreign photographers covered the war. Today the smallest event is covered by about 25 networks. The scale of photojournalism is different now that television has taken over many of its former functions. The rise of digital camera technology is another major development. So much of the change in my work is due to technology, not to me."
Abbas does, however, acknowledge a shift in his own approach to photography.
"When you start out as a photojournalist you tend to be idealistic. After 35 years I am still interested in the world, but I recognise the limitations of my work. Now I call myself a photographer rather than a photojournalist. I work for five or seven years on a project. I like to produce books, because they give you more control over your pictures -- rather than giving them up for adoption, as it were. The process of editing and sequencing photographs for a book is more like the work of a writer."
The wider world of photojournalism has experienced upheaval in recent years, adds Abbas. "For many years Magnum focussed on photojournalism. Nowadays, the work of the collective is still documentary, but it reflects a different vision. Our photography is more often geared towards the art market."
Echoes of this renewal are also sounded in Iran. "During the revolution, photography became important in Iran as a form of expression. The hostage crisis furthered the careers of several Iranian photojournalists, since their foreign counterparts found it harder to work in Iran after this. My generation focussed on documentary photography and this is what you saw up until about five years ago. But now there is an explosion in Iran of all the modern trends in photography. Whether it is photography of architecture, personal portraits or anything else, you can find it in Iran."
