KURDISTAN PHOTO ARCHIVE - KEYWAN KARIMI

I grew up in a big family that a part of them are photographers, in a family that opened the first studio in the region <where it was possible for everyone to have their picture taken in a chosen setting. When this studio first opened in the early 1920s, the photographers worked with a huge German travel chamber camera (later with an FKD camera), and the store still exists, my brother currently working there with a digital camera. During these 100 years, we have collected half a million negatives of people's faces and houses. During the 1979 revolution and later during the Iran-Iraq wars, some of these negatives were burnt but fortunately there are still a large number left. This time, I'm interested in archives from the same period as those I can compare them with Swidish photo archive from that time. I want to note this difference, and I also always wonder who the people in the photos are, what they are doing and why. The similarities between the people in the photos, and why the photos are taken, is the reason I want to compare the archives and it is the reason that prompts me to go and review my Kurdish family archives. If we look at things through the medium of time and art, we see two people with the same instrument looking at the world: the CAMERA. The frame, the light, the statics and the composition are one thing, the subject or subjects of the photo is another thing. I wonder what was happening in Iran and in my family during the time these Swidish photos were taken. So many questions can come from this. As I am at the beginning of this project, it is still too early for me to be able to clearly see all the different routes that my journey may take. But building something out of these archives is my main idea. For this, I already have some guiding ideas that I set out below. These photos were collected from the 500,000 negative stored at our family photo studio founded in 1951 in Baneh, Iran. There are two categories of photos available;

The first type of photographs present in the archive correspond to personal photographs. If, once printed, these photographs show close-ups of faces, the negatives are very different: due to the wide lens used, we see medium shots that have captured the upper half of the body or sometimes the entire body. You can see the clothes, hands, backgrounds and accessories of the workshop. These photos show both children and elderly men and women. The negatives are archived in an annual order. We can see the effects of circumstances and events in the photos at a glance. Since 1951, Baneh has been confronted with events such as: the 1979 revolution, the Kurdish guerrillas and the Iran-Iraq war. Before the revolution, for example, women did not have a Hijab (headscarf) for their identity card photos. However, after the revolution, their clothes gradually changed. Most of the men, who were farmers or laborers in the 1960s and have callused hands and rough clothes in the photos, armed themselves during the guerrilla war for Kurdish independence. The traditional children's costumes gradually changed during the 1950s, 60s and 70s and English names, signs and marks appear in them. The soldiers who were in Baneh, due to the city's strategic location, have photos that illustrate successive historical changes, visible in military uniforms, ranks and hairstyles.
Second category
The second category of photos is made up of memorial photos or so-called family photos, taken to record time and keep track. This type of archive is also important for carrying out an anthropology and a typology of Kurds at different times. For example, taking annual photos of children up to a specific age was common in Kurdish regions. The bride and groom also used to take photos after their wedding with a curtain against the painted background of rivers, trees and meadows (although all in black and white).
So many questions come to my mind when i look the photos, Who was the photographer behind these photographs? At what point in his life did he take these photos? What was he doing in his life? Was he happy? Why did you take all these photos? Did they have a specific use or were they just personal photos? Was the photographer an artist? Was he rich? And if not, how did he find the money to take these photos? Where did he develop these photos, if he developed them at all? Did he survive Iran-Iraq and civil War between Kurd and new regime to see the archives he produced, ghosts of a bygone age? Was the photographer involved in the war? Was he a journalist? And his family, his children, what became of them? Is his studio and house was standing or has it been destroyed? Did he return to the spaces where he had taken the photos after the war? Did he really look at his photos again? In Iran, during the period Shah Reza was in power, an intermediary sovereign between the Khajar dynasty and Shah Reza Pavlavi, who would rule from 1940 until the Islamist revolution in 1979. The first modernizer Iran has ever known, Shah Reza Khan imposed a political line that would lead to September 1940, when his son, Shah Reza Pavlav, took power. Power which he would retain until the revolution of 1979. September 1940 is also an important date for Iran because, for the first time in 200 years, the country is occupied (by the Allies). In the Kurdish provinces, from 1946, a great movement took place which had a lot of influence on society. When you look at the Kurdish archives, you can see a mix between modernism and tradition and, more importantly, you can also see the faces that are suffering from history in the making. This period is one of a troubled historical moment, where history seems to be accelerating. A story that can therefore echo that of Europe during the same period: difficulty in following what is happening, in remembering what is transitional, unstable. How to capture this kind of time, how to read the archives they left behind? This period can be extend from 1940 to present time. Specially 1979 revolution and war 1981-1988. What I was able to understand, looking at the photographic achive belonging to my family, is that photography is not always an art linked to the rich, upper classes. It can also be a profession, serving very practically to feed family and children. My ancestors weren't aware of making art at all, they were normal people, who just had to find something to live on somehow. It is for this reason that these photos, taken in the last century, are not artistic in the classic sense of the word. In the old cameras, exposure time was important. Wide shots were taken, then photos were put in an enlarger, faces or people selected, cropped, and the rest of the image discarded. This is the totality of the image that we have today, which gives us a lot of information, the costumes, in particular being complete. If my ancestors did not aim to document a period, through the large panoramas taken in the studio and the observable traditional clothes, it is nevertheless a whole part of Kurdish history that is revealed. The evolution of dress codes for workers, peasants, administrators, etc. tells us a lot about an era. It is extremely interesting to make connections between images and historical events. In this way, we can see, for example, that women's dresses change radically before and after the revolution. Or that throughout the war with Iraq, people were having their pictures taken with their guns. Or that during the time of freedom, some people who had been banned or in prison started to appear in the photographs. All these changes visible in the images show us the reality of society at different historical times. When I made the film "Writing in the city", I followed, through graffiti, the history of Iran. Now I am following the history of the Kurds, through the small room of the small photographic studio in this small town near the Iran-Iraq border. I believe that by looking at the faces of these people, you can see the face of history. I believe that the sacred aura that Walter Benjamin defined is destroyed, because uneducated, illiterate people, located far from the main centers, can tell us through these images the story as if they were professional historians. In the Kurdish background, the eyes of the photographed express both hope and the tragedies of history.