The Bed

I prefer Yahya Dehghanpour’s single photographs more than those created through montage, collage, and similar techniques. In my view, the familiar signs and elements in Dehghanpour’s imagery—which have gradually and organically taken shape over the years, based on his own inner impulses and momentary passions—are more vividly present in his standalone photographs than in the orderly, disciplined execution of his constructed, arranged works.

Dehghanpour has always sought (and still does) not only to preserve traces of Iranian culture within the formal experimentation of his photography, but also to create a continuous dialogue between the verbal world of literature and the visual realm of photography. His approach to various photographic styles and the wide range of subjects he has worked with over the course of his fifty-year career speaks not so much to a formalist experimentation with the language of photography, but rather to a deep concern with discovering new and ineffable meanings.

Yahya Dehghanpour’s photographic world is weightless and light; full of layered meanings and references, playful and delicate in its presentation of resemblances and equivalencies—qualities that are fluidly rooted in our poetic and literary tradition.

In this simple and direct photograph too, the "fragmentation" and the tendency to flatten perspective—one of the structural foundations of many of his images—make themselves known. Despite the absence of people, the photograph feels lively and energetic, overflowing with recognizable features of Dehghanpour’s visual universe: formalist precision, visual ambiguity, hidden eroticism, overt humor, and the embodiment of an Iranian emotional atmosphere that flows naturally from his own thought and artistic language.

The photograph of the beds—with its colorful world and its layered, stacked surfaces; with its dense, tangled patterns and hues—resembles a beautiful, eye-catching old patchwork quilt. It also serves as an apt metaphor for the multifaceted, dispersed, and delightfully unfocused world of his spoken thoughts and associations.

^*This text has previously been published on the website akasse.com with slight differences.