Bāygān: House of Photographs and Words

Hengameh Golestan

Untitled from the series Khomein

1974-1980

Text

Sara Yektapour

Beware!

I think the accident that tore this photograph in two makes something ring in my ear: “You have leaned upon water—beware.”*

What I do not see shows me what the photograph does not show, and warns me to judge with care whatever I do see. I must stay aware of what information about this person’s life the photograph truly gives me—and of the fragile webs my mind spins around this document. The darkness on the right half keeps reminding me that the woman whose face I cannot see—perhaps it is better that I cannot, for the first gate of judgment, especially toward women, often opens through observing their faces—lived in the 1970s. I see her black-and-white bedding, the dim lamp of her room, the silhouettes of objects, a frame upon her shelf, her four walls with their mended cracks, her bangles, a part of her clothing and the chador wrapped around her. And at the same time, I do not see the countless elements of that extended, cause-and-effect-laden life she led.

In the autumn of 2025, through a photograph taken in another era by Hengameh Golestan, I can grasp that this woman—who once existed within a definite span of time and a familiar corner of the world—is not some distant Other; on the contrary, she may be profoundly close to me. Behind this thin layer of a few hundredths of a second that has reached me from her, there lie unspoken things whose existence I know precisely because the image has reached my eyes, even if their nature remains hidden from me.

I am attached to this half-full, half-empty photograph because it reminds me of what a photograph cannot tell, and how the words that come to mind when we look at images of other people’s lives—despite all their allure—are merely pre-fabricated notions, born of habit, riding upon reality, striving to fill the void of images with bittersweet stories and to compress the winding lives of human beings into grand and oversimplified words.

This dry, half photograph keeps me aware.

^* Sanāi Ghaznavi, Hadīqat al-haqīqa