The Crowd as Human Tapestry in the Art of Sadegh Tirafkan

Sadegh Tirafkan (1965-2013) is one of Iran’s most revered photographic artists whose work explores issues of contemporary Iranian national identity in tension with ancient Persian traditions. Early in Tirafkan’s career, he used international strategies of ‘performative’ photography to explore the lingering personal and cultural traumas of the Iran-Iraq war. Subsequently, his work continued to focus on issues of masculinity, heroic sacrifice, and mourning in works that depicted Ashura ceremonies in Tehran. Recurring motifs of blood, martyrdom, and violence have been points of critical and aesthetic inquiry over the course of his career. Since 2003, Tirafkan developed a method using digital photography that allowed him to layer imagery into collages that reference traditional Persian art forms, such as miniature painting (from the Shahnameh legends), the low-relief sculptures of ancient sites (Persepolis), as well as textiles and carpets. A significant transformation of Tirafkan’s photo-collages is evident starting in 2008, when one witnesses a shift from works presenting individual identities and self-portraits to those depicting large crowds of Iranian people. These crowd images would eventually comprise two major bodies of work: the Multitude series and the Human Tapestry series, which are the primary focus of this paper. These works were created at a historical moment of great political aspiration and unrest, and coincide with the Green Movement demonstrations and subsequent state violence. Yet at precisely this time, Tirafkan evacuates all references to blood and violence from his artwork. The vision Tirafkan presents involves a dual focus on individuals and on the robust, dynamic communities that sustain and integrate them. The faces of Iran’s young generation, as well as women, girls, and boys are configured into colourful textile-inspired geometries enabled by the digital photographic collage method. These are holistic visions of Iranian crowds united by “common threads” and “woven together” into alternative statements, which seem to counter the radical upheavals occurring within the Iranian society and politics of that pivotal historic moment. To explore the theoretical potential of Tirafkan’s artwork, I will refer to (among other paradigms) theories of “the multitude” as a force that counters state ideologies proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), as well as to W.J.T. Mitchell’s identification and deconstruction of the stereotypical notions of the militant Islamic crowd so often presented by Western news media, outlined in his essay “Clonophobia” (2008, The Ethics and Politics of the Image).