Bāygān: House of Photographs and Words

Katayoun Karami

Have A Break

2012

Text

Ghazaleh Hedayat

Have a Break. Pictures that remained silent

She sits there, her eyes are looking at us from every direction. Is she calm and peaceful or longing to rest? I don’t know.

Katayoun Karami took a photograph with a digital camera of the image of a woman inside a large camera. She printed them on glass—on a mirror—and turned the glass so that the outer layer would be both the glass frame and a protector of the image. A single image is divided into four parts, and each of these images is printed and framed separately. These four identical photographs, with slight differences in their fractures, are installed one after another on the wall and eventually fill the four walls of the gallery. One lies on the floor, waiting to be awaken when the plumb lines fall and take its place on the wall. The falling of these plumb lines is in the hands of the viewers. Each of us can take hold of the thread of these plumb lines, release them, let them fall, and capture the soul of the picture.

The image is divided into neat pieces by the guide lines on the frosted glass of the large camera. Each piece brings us closer to the image to look more closely and meticulously at that part. The image is not sharp and doesn’t have the clarity of today’s pictures. Her gaze is on us. The background is dark, and the softness of light flickers on her face. The smile on her lips and a pale earring in this darkness draw me in. That same earring, with its faint sparkle, leads me swiftly from this photograph into the heart of a Vermeer painting. Back and forth, this photograph and that painting keep pulling me. Here, that strange headscarf is missing; the photographer has let her hair loose. We are not stunned by that sudden glance as if the painter stole it. The subject/photographer looks at us calmly, or we look calmly at her. Due to the mirror-like image, the earring has shifted from the left ear to the right ear. And a few steps beyond that, I step back one hundred and fifty years before Vermeer and distance myself a bit from that painter’s gaze and light to move from the white earring to that fleeting smile.

Now I pass through that glass and photograph and reach the poplar wood panel. Half Da Vinci, half Mona Lisa, here the photographer and the subject have become one. And it seems at this exact moment the crack in the glass and the cracks in the layers of oil paint merge. I look at the fracture of the photo’s glass or the crack in the painting’s skin—or the skin of the face, I don’t know. Mona Lisa, or that joyous one, with these cracks and the constant sound of breaking, her faint smile fades from memory. I return here again. And in the next image, I see a person; in one there is calm, and in the other there is anxiety and fear. The one sitting calmly is the photograph’s subject, and the one who unsettles me is the photographer, who has aimed herself with the cross at the center of the image. The plumb lines are set in motion. It’s as if these plumb lines, which balanced the pictures, broke them, dried up the smiles, and made Mona Lisa pregnant with death.

But in the next image, I see myself—a woman walking among the brilliant paintings of art history, hearing the gaze and whispers of each for a moment, remaining silent, then stepping back to move in step with the history of photography, to see how subject and object have consciously become one and to see how the desire to see and be seen merge. And again, I see that I can sit in any of these places. It doesn’t matter whether she is Vermeer’s daughter or his servant, his lover or his wife, whether she is Lisa Gherardini or Da Vinci, whether Mona Lisa is pregnant or joyful after giving birth, whether she is Katayoun Karami or any other woman—I can sit there and here, I can look at the painter, the photographer, I can look at her and see myself.

The plumb lines are set in motion again.

^*This text was previously published in Herfeh: Honarmand art magazine,issue 61.