ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the photographic object in an expanded field of artistic production, one that freely borrows strategies and methods from other fields and media. Photographers and artists played with prints and negatives in the darkroom, but there was a limit to the medium’s flexibility. The work of Iranian-British artist Mitra Tabrizian exists precisely in this complex space between representation and documentation. Tabrizian, who is both a photographer and a filmmaker, left Iran for Europe in 1977, shortly before the Iranian Revolution. The relationship between cinema and photography has been culturally fraught since the former’s invention. The principle of stillness was inherent to photography from its early days: subjects had to remain immobile for a long time in order for the camera operator to capture the image, often to the point of physical discomfort.
