Session 13: Photography between Politics and Poetry

Guest Speaker: Sara Abbaspour (MFA in Photography, School of Art, Yale University)

JANUARY 27th, 2023

Abstract

Presenting photographs made in various locations in Iran and the U.S., Sara Abbaspour draws on influences from her background in urban studies. While embracing a historical approach, her photographs often seem timeless and placeless. These works encompass various forms and subjects, from urbanscapes to portraits and still-lives, and at the same time, intend to study the poetics of spaces in their transitional states. In other words, she explores the relationship between spaces and their inhabitants in their constant state of becoming. She collaborates with these elements and often considers these photographs self-portraits. Her work exists in a meeting point between temporal and eternal, inside and out, familiar and peculiar, personal and political, seen and unseen, magic and mundane, imagined and experienced.

Suggested reading before the meeting

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (pg. 3-15, 94-100)

Speaker’s Biography

Sara Abbaspour (born in Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian Artist who lives and works between the U.S. and Iran. She holds an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art, an MA in Photography from the University of Tehran, and a B.Sc. in Urban Planning and Design from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Sara is primarily interested in making visual poetry using portraiture and landscape. She has photographically reflected on the urban public sphere vs. private realms and interiors vs. exteriors as mental spaces. Exploring the notion of psychogeography, her works exist in between the imagined and the experienced in the current socio-political climate.

Links to the literature mentioned in the meeting