Photographs | 2007
I live in a country whose culture is written entirely with the marks of the past; marks that have been overwritten, again and again, with new inscriptions so that they conceal themselves from decipherers. “For everything that is hidden, there is a copy of that which is visible.” I have always tried to confront the complexities and concealed layers within the culture of my homeland. Walking through the traditional bazaar of Shiraz was, for me, an astonishing experience — a chance to witness and give form to a part of that hidden complexity that my culture has passed down, passage by passage, from one generation to the next.
In the series “Passage | Bazaar,” I depict the bazaar at midsummer noon: an enclosed, empty, and silent space in which the absence of people itself becomes a kind of presence. This silence is saturated with cultural memory and the memory of place — a memory that has settled into the historical fabric of Iran’s old bazaars. Each multi-panel frame of the series offers a narrative of the connection between social history and traditional urban architecture and, in the stillness of noon, reflects ongoing social, economic, and cultural transformations.
My aim in this series is to record my personal account of this encounter. I focus on seemingly simple, everyday moments and their effect on the collective memory of the city’s inhabitants. This body of work is at once a personal meditation on time, place, and cultural inheritance, and a critical attempt to reconsider the role of the bazaar in social life.
– Parham Taghioff, 2007
