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Over the past twenty years, as he has traveled throughout Iran,
Mohsen Rastani has been taking family portraits. From sparsely
populated villages to small, crowded cities, wherever he goes, he
takes a white backdrop with him. Sometimes when he stays in
one place for a while, he opens a temporary studio to shoot his portraits. And
sometimes he makes the street into his studio. When he sees people he wants
to photograph, he tells them he doesn’t wish to bother them but asks them to
call him. In this way, his subjects come to him, and when they stand between
his camera and the backdrop he allows them to present themselves however
they like.
To Rastani, the white backdrop is almost as important to these photographs
as the people that appear against it. The backdrop, he says, “isolates people
better in our minds, so they become eternal . . . like myths, carved images on
the stone walls of Persepolis.”
To see the rest of Mohsen Rastani's photographs from the Fall 2008 issue, click the link below:
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