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Feature, history
The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole
Text Hamza Shehryar
Behzad Khosravi Noori describes himself as a visual artist, archivist, necromancer, and educator – titles that offer a glimpse into the richly layered, almost mystical nature of his work.
A professor at Habib University in Karachi and a researcher at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Behzad’s academic and artistic practice spans film, installation, and archival studies – centring around the interrogation of Global South histories in the so-called post-colonial world. He excavates forgotten narratives, reframing them as counter-histories to the dominant East-West and North-South dichotomies, challenging how we remember and contextualise political relationships.
His latest exhibition, The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole, designed in collaboration with Fujifilm and on view at Gulf Photo Plus at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue until March 31, is a deeply personal excavation. Drawing from photographs taken by his grandfather, Gholamreza Amirbeigi, between 1956 and 1968, Behzad confronts the endurance of memory. At the core of the exhibition is the Rooh Kitch (روح کیہچ), a handmade camera – literally translating to “Soul Catcher” in Urdu – that serves as both an artefact and a portal, bridging the past and present.
Dazed MENA caught up with Behzad to discuss his practice, bringing The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole to life, and the ways in which archival material can be a tool for radical reinterpretation and telling the stories of underrepresented communities from the Global South.
Dazed MENA: Tell us about The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole – how the idea for this exhibition came about and how you brought it to life.
Behzad: I have a very personal relationship with this project. The archival material that I have been investigating is related to photographs that my grandfather took, which I accidentally inherited from my grandmother years after he passed away.
So, I wanted to explore how it is possible to show your family album in public. It’s not just about presenting the photo album, but it is also about exploring the act of photography itself, through the work of one itinerant photographer, my grandfather, over the course of decades.
That is the foundation of the project. Looking at my family album, looking at the socio-political events in Iran during that time, looking at how working-class communities from around the country immigrated to the capital, Tehran, after the Second World War due to the bankruptcy of the whole country.
And, I can now claim that these are the only documents from the life of those people from that particular time.
What does itinerancy mean to you as an artist?
My father was a bus driver, and he always travelled between different cities in Iran. Sometimes, as a kid, I would travel with him, and I enjoyed going to different cities with him. So, for me, the idea of itinerancy is a combination of these two things – the itinerant photographer that my grandfather was and travelling with a bus driver and the very enthusiastic photographer that my father was.
However, the notion of itinerancy became stronger as a form of artistic methodology. The notion of itinerancy became a reflection of the materiality of the border and the violence and conflict of the border, including the worst form of border, which is the invisible border.
“What will happen to your art when it crosses the border? What will happen to your writing when it crosses the border?” These became very important open-ended questions for me, which I ask myself all the time, and are the formation of itinerancy for me.
How do the ideas of movement and displacement influence your storytelling?
Storytelling, or as we call it in Urdu and Farsi, Dastangoi, is very important to me. To quote a philosopher who I like, Walter Benjamin wrote a text in 1936, The Storyteller, in which he mentioned that a storyteller is a person who has a story from a faraway land. That is interesting to me because when you travel, you have a story from somewhere else, and you’re trying to tell that story to someone else. But sometimes, these stories aren’t strange. They’re about people from somewhere else who have the same conditions and experiences in the same socio-political environment. And in The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole, even though I am looking at the foundation of the use of photography in relation to specific working-class communities and neighbourhoods in Tehran, you can trace these stories, themes, and foundations to elsewhere in the Global South during the process of de-colonisation.
You use the word ‘prosopagnosia’ to describe your work. What does it mean – and how does it link to your exploration of the history of the Global South in our so-called post-colonial world?
Prosopagnosia is face blindness. It is a condition where you see a face, but you don’t recognise it. It’s a very interesting metaphor because you could use prosopagnosia as a metaphorical critical analysis of the history of the Global South in general, and partly, for the combination of class, gender and ethnicity in the history of the Global South.
We are consciously and actively invisibilising certain stories, certain identities, and certain social movements. So, although there are people who are always around us, working for us, providing for us, we don’t recognise their faces – we don’t recognise their stories.
In that sense, prosopagnosia is a very interesting way to describe the challenges of historiography within the Global South as a de-colonial act, because we are indeed living in a so-called post-colonial era – but when de-colonial work is still an ongoing process, then we need to ask: how is it possible to go against the prosopagnosia of history?
Does your work challenge or reshape dominant narratives about Iranian identity and culture? If so, how and why?
Partly, yes – just because I’m acting as an artist, and I’m presenting my work within venues that are related to art and culture.
There are certain class aspects in the field of art that are very important. We mainly talk about the upper-middle class and the elite when it comes to art – and not just in Iran but everywhere in the world.
It is essential not to hide your political agencies and bring up the notion of class in relation to ethnicity and gender. To go against the condition of personal prosopagnosia. To bring in other voices, other faces, and other ways of looking at society within the spaces that are not necessarily defined for inclusion of different class agencies.
As I mentioned earlier, I can now claim that The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole is the only documentation of working-class immigrant people southwest of Tehran. So, there are questions about what happened to other communities, or about how we stigmatise working-class communities in large cities. And, again, it’s not just Tehran. Globally, working-class immigrants have always been stigmatised as criminals, as stupid, as you name it. It never changes. If you look at current political realities, the same narration towards the notion of nationalism, belonging, and centralisation is still strong.
The question is about how art can actually tackle those ideas and the states of mind of those who challenge the notion of diversity.
It’s not widely known that photography’s origins can be traced back to Ibn al-Haytham and the discovery of the camera obscura. Could you explain the significance of the history of photography and how it influences our perception of photography today?
There is a multiplicity in The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole. That multiplicity is partly in looking at certain people from contemporary times and what camera they are using, which is very much a continuation of the foundation of the camera obscura, which was defined in the Kitab al-Manazir – Book of Optics – by Ibn al-Haytham in the 11th century.
In the introduction of the Kitab al-Manazir, Ibn al-Haytham centres on how man’s responsibility is to question the things that they have learned before. For him, that question was about the means of emancipation. How is it possible to redo everything that you have learned?
Kitab al-Manazir was translated into six European languages during medieval times, and that book was being taught in Europe to study the science behind light. But when Eurocentrism started, they started to undermine and erase the names of Islamic age scientists, to instead emphasise that everything started in Europe and is related to Greek civilisation.
So, we can actually get into the idea that Eurocentrism is not necessarily just related to the stigmatisation of the East and South and non-white people. Eurocentrism is an active act to erase European history by Europeans. It is important to recognise that Eurocentrism affected colonised territories but also erased the history of relations between other geographies and Europe.
In an era of rapid digital photography, why is it important to revisit historical methods like pinhole photography?
Well, for me personally, it is very enjoyable. It is playful; it is fun.
It is also very much related to necromancy – because I often think: if Ibn al-Haytham was alive, how would he define the notion of photography now? That’s why I call myself a necromancer.
On top of all this, when you build your camera yourself, when you try to take a picture, when you develop the picture inside the camera that you build, you think about the process of image production.
In courses that I’m teaching in different locations in Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East, we forget that we have a camera or a mobile phone, and we try to build a camera.
Every single picture that we take takes about 10 to 15 minutes with the camera we build. At the end of the semester, I always receive comments from students about how they cannot really take pictures with their mobile phones anymore because of the amount of labour that goes into making that camera.
I think it’s essential to think about any form of manual labour and craftsmanship because this is the way that we could really define ourselves in the world.
What do you hope people take away from experiencing your exhibition?
I really hope that people – especially those people who suffer from historical prosopagnosia – find that my exhibition emancipates them and encourages them to go home and create their own family albums.
In certain geographies, especially in the Global South, we don’t have any documentation because photography is very much related to the representation of the bourgeoisie. The camera that we are presenting and that my grandfather was working with played a significant role in democratising photography because it was the first time that working-class people could sit in front of the camera and have their picture taken. Before that, you had to go to the studio, and working-class people could not afford to go to the studio.
So, if someone sees pictures of their grandparents and recognises that they’re not just pictures but something more than that – that they are the social conditions of their life; that would be amazing. That’s my hope.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.