Bāygān: House of Photographs and Words

Omid Salehi

Untitled from the series My Military Service

1992

Text

Sara Yektapour

Forced Order

I start looking from the bottom of the image. From the barbed wires violently separating the outside space from the inside. It seems that on this harsh ground, an unpleasant movement is underway. Even before seeing the bodies—which speak for themselves—one can make guesses. The pressure marks on the bodies are evident, especially on the right side of the image. In that dark face with the body twisted, and another whose gaze, just as it stumbles toward the unknown figure on the left, falls outside the frame.

Military service is about imposing order, yet what is seen in the image is so disorderly that I can’t even discern what pattern was supposed to be identically repeated among the soldiers. In the middle of the image, someone, overwhelmed by hardship and fatigue, lowers their head, steps forward with their right foot, and bends over. Just slightly below them, another person—whose attention seems drawn to the camera—repeats the same movement with their left foot, and their body is more expanded. My eyes move from that person’s right foot to the individual behind them, whose body posture is completely different. I start thinking about how a single command is executed in different ways on different bodies, and these uncoordinated reactions distinguish these faceless individuals dressed alike—a kind of identity recognition through the space of the body.