The street is covered by varied types of arches, with gray bricks laid into delicate geometrical patterns. The apexes of the domes have a small circular opening, designed to facilitate a minimal change of air. They shoot narrow shafts of light that draw a line in the dusty air, like pillars of light supporting the vaults.
I am walking down the main corridor in the bazaar of Isfahan, the former capital of Iran. The passage meanders for two kilometres, with densely packed shops, bartering customers and men pulling metal carts filled with carpets competing for space.
The typical bazaar shop simply consist of barren room, lined from floor to ceiling with goods, and a shopkeeper somewhere in between, traditionally with a listless and indifferent expression. A picture of a father or uncle, the person who originally set up the store peers from a picture on the wall, keeping an eye on his succession. The vendors make little effort to differentiate their stores from their neighbours with signs or labels, as passers-by are directly confronted with the colour and scent of what is on sale.
As I walk further into the bazaar I pass clusters of shops selling goods of the same type. People making their living selling plastic buckets take up one small corridor, as do the mandatory pushy carpet merchants, and the sellers of suspicious rubber bands for textiles with global brands written on them.
The area specialized on handicrafts is filled with sound of tinkering and banging, reverberating like an industrial hall with erratic machines. Men are sitting outside their shops hammering their bronze and brass plates or vases into shape and carefully adding new decorative patterns.
One of the craftsmen points my attention to the metalwork of a neighbouring shop. The shallow carvings, he claims, are a sign of industrial imports from India. Not even the exquisite walls of the bazaar offer protection from the outside economic forces.
(a column for nef’s Radical Economics magazine, the pictures are actually from Tehran and Yazd)
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I wanted to picture what goes on under the surface of Regent’s Canal, the heaps of shopping trolleys thrown from bridges, the stream of random packaging waste exhibiting Londoner’s patterns of consumption, mixed together with a crude ecosystem of algae and primitive fish. When trying to photograph this underwater life, I quickly realized my problem: What I was seeing was not just the things below water, but also the reflection of the world above, and it was the latter, to my unluck, that shone with more power in the pictures. This should all be glaringly obvious, but it was not my intuitive first feeling when peering below the surface. My mind fixated on the submerged thing, I ignored all other stimulus as unrelevant. With the image that was shown on my camera screen, having passed the lense and a serious of digital transformations, I could not perform the same trick of picking up only the object of my attention. The result looked more like a confused overlapping collage of unrelated images. It took a while of disordered walking and perplexed tilting of my head before I came to terms with how changes in my perspective affected simultaneously both my underwater target and the reflected mirror image of something else far away.
Photography is an abstracting medium. It records a trace of an object, and in doing so, inevitably simplifies it, reduces it to some of its visual ualities. This simplification is in many cases key to what makes a photo beautiful. It can start from an everyday object, and bring out and emphasize something about what it looks like: The staircase becomes a spiral of amazing regularity, the flower a perfect geometric construct, and so forth. (This is for a large part what makes black and white photography distinctively beautiful. The marked reduction of colors strengthen the impression that you are no longer looking at the object nor its pure representation. It distances us from the thing and elevates the picture to a visual object in its own right.) Or in my case, the surface of a canal becomes an abstract mishmash of jumping colours.
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I went for a nature walk in the centre of Europe’s largest metropolis. The Barbican is running a nice exhibition with the title Radical Nature. Though I found the land art described inside mostly quite trivial, some of the installations are quite intriguing. Well worth a visit. The best part of it was however Secret Nature, a guided walk to explore wild plant life within London, to see the uninvited green things within the concrete structures of the Barbican and the surrounding City of London.
Our guide was a very sympathetic fellow from the Royal Horticulturalist Society, with a bristly gray beard and thick glasses. A striped collared shirt was tucked into trousers that were raised well above his waist. He spoke delicate sentences with long pauses, as if to make sure no word was misplaced. He gave the impression of a man with a passion for categorization and order.
I was genuinely surprized of the variety of wild plant life that was there, in the cracks of asphalt, struggling for space in the kept green spaces, in the small holes of walls barely able to keep the necessary moisture. They were not just blunt weeds and hay, but also colourful flowers. Some of them had apparently escaped from inhabitants’ flower pots and were making a run in their newly found freedom. Such wild urban flora had previously completely escaped my attention. It was indeed like a secret, one that no-one cared to hear.
The guide had some delightful stories about the origins and journeys of the plants. They spread via birds and the lunch boxes of city workers, or were earlier carried in the bowels of horses pulling the beer into the local pubs from the country. Some had come from as far as China and Indonesia. The most fascinating case was a small yellow flower that looked rather commonplace but in fact originated from Mount Edna. It had been introduced to the Oxford Botanic Gardens sometime in the 17th century and had soon began spreading along the walls of colleges. When the railroad arrived, the cunning plant advanced along the rails propelled by trains. (I find these stories amusing when they are told as if the flora acted with full intention - I suppose it is particularly justified in the case with the uncultivated plants that make their moves regardless of people.) It had now made its way into the square mile. The City is obviously one of the main hubs of the globalized world, drawing in people from everywhere and directing the flow of the world’s funds. Some of its guests from far away lands go mostly unnoticed.
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The Iranians have a beautiful habit of posting pictures of the recently deceased on their walls. When I first walked the streets, I thought they were advertisements for politicians. I did not particularly wonder at the serious expressions. Politics is serious work. Najma, an overwhelmingly friendly Isfahanian, had offered to guide me in the city. She explained that the pictures were there to inform the local people about the death and events of mourning. The funerals here are not just a one-off thing, but take place in reoccurring cycles: a week after a burial, then after 40 days, and once more a year later.
Placading the streets with pictures of the departed shows a continuing importance of place and community in Iranian life. The death of an individual is considered relevant to everyone that lives around them. In European cities, I would discover the passing of the people I live close to only by noting that I had not seen certain elderly people in the staircase for a while. Announcements of death are made in national newspapers, targeting no-one in particular, drawing mostly the attention of bored Sunday newspaper readers wondering at the outdated names of the unlucky individuals involved.
The grave stares of the dead remind the passers-by of them. They look on like the posters of wanted criminals in western films. As time goes on, the everyday life takes on new forms quite oblivious of those that had inhabited the streets earlier, and the pictures become shaded and peel off. They become obstructed by advertisements or a new round of deceased, covered in a layer of paper as their bodies are in soil.
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