The Modern BuildingThis striking photograph was taken by Iranian-American photographer Shirin Neshat. It depicts the back view of a woman cloaked in traditional Muslim hijab, walking alongside a starkly white modern building. To provide you with a little context on Neshat’s work, I will start off with a little background information on her life and artistic career. Neshat was born and raised in Iran, to a family that was open to Western values. As a result, she was encouraged to be an independent, free-thinking woman from an early age and was sent to the United States for her college education. She did not begin to practice art until she returned to Iran in 1990 and felt compelled to visually express the change she witnessed as a mechanism for coping with the discrepancy between the culture she now experienced and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised. Her work refers to the social, cultural, and religious codes of Muslim society, but she actively resists stereotypical representations of Islamic society.
The lone figure is in the foreground of the photo, just barely contained within the frame. By capturing her back turned to the camera, Neshat transforms her from the subject of the photo to a portal through which to engage the viewer. The viewer is facing the image in the same direction as the figure, allowing him or her to transplant him or herself into the figure’s position. By doing this, Neshat is perhaps encouraging the viewer to look at the building from the figure’s perspective, evoking the viewer to think about how this figure may perceive the extremely modern, Western building. The building dominates most of the composition, forming an imposing presence that seems worlds away from the displaced figure despite their physical proximity. The figure is parallel to rather than facing the building, emphasizing the unbridgeable disconnect between them. The two sets of spiral staircase have a strangely organic shape that breaks ups the linear, geometric configuration of the building. The first staircase juts out, looming over the figure as if threatening to swallow her.
The most important feature of the photo is the contrast between the dark, isolated figure and the monolithic building. Neshat also emphasizes this contrast through her use of sharp lighting. Instead of utilizing gentle lighting that would soften the contrast between the light and shadowed elements, Neshat highlights the building’s geometric sterility. As a result, the figure, dressed in all black, is even more pronounced against the almost blindingly white building.
In Modern Building, Neshat uses composition and lighting to create a provocative photograph that explores the tension between a globalizing world that is becoming increasingly dominated by Western modernity and traditional Islamic culture. Time appears to be suspended in the stasis of this scene, in which historic and modern forces come into contention.
--Alice
In light of Shirin Neshat's first, recently released, feature-length movie Women Without Men based on the magical realist novel of the same name, I think this image begins to take on a magical realist cast, too. The building is monolithic but the curves of its staircases also make it organic; the large pattern of the paved ground makes the woman seem shrunk, like Alice in Wonderland. I think this photograph is wonderful for this tenuous dreamy quality.
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