Gohar Dashti

Deeply marked by the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88), the younger generation of Iranian photographers often returns to that reality, which has had a profound impact on Iranian society. Gohar Dashti tackles the subject explicitly in Today’s Life and War (2008). Yet her images go beyond references to a specific event, providing a clear illustration of the shift that occurs between the attempt to preserve day-to-day life in wartime and the “day-to-day becoming” of conflict. Her photographs revolve around the contrast between the staging of a young couple’s routine — meals, TV, newspapers — and a scenography of war made of armoured vehicles, soldiers, and sandbag shelters. The formal declensions of photography take the representation of war, conventionally associated with photojournalism, toward a more conceptual and symbolic dimension made of disjunctions and discrepancies between the subject and the setting.