9.22.25 — Photography in Flight
Sheida Soleimani was born the same year as an emerging nation. Neither event must have seemed auspicious.
Iran declared itself an Islamic republic after taking Americans hostage and precipitating a global crisis. It had Soleimani’s parents among the many fearing for their lives. She spent her infancy in uncertainty and fear before the family’s escape to America.
She calls her survey at the International Center of Photography “Panjereh,” which means both a passageway and a window in Farsi, but theirs is not its only record of passage. She has dedicated her work to another kind of flight as well, of migratory birds, many suffering injury or disease. After so many years, can photography bring deliverance—and I work this together with a recent report on photography by Consuelo Kanaga with its sense of community and commitment as a longer review and my latest upload.
Sheida Soleimani probably cannot remember much of Iran, but everything she does is infused with memory. She knows that passage did not come easily. Her parents had to rely on separate escape routes, one more circuitous than the other, battered suitcases, and two sets of plants to make the adopted country feel like home—and she pictures them all separately, too. Even so, this is anything but documentary photography or photojournalism. In the print actually called Deliverance, her father rides on horseback, a Persian rug in place of a saddle. Elsewhere he sits on the same rug but on the floor, as if to have the best of both worlds, Islamic tradition and hipster yoga.
Husband and wife share their photographic stardom with all manner of actors, human and otherwise. Soleimani is at once a photographer, an activist, and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. The connections are no more than puns, but her parents and the birds are painfully real. She describes subsets of her series as about OPEC, human rights abuses, reparations packages, geopolitical violence, and testimony to survivors. She calls her longest series “Ghostwriter” because it is their story as much as hers. Never mind, though, for the only people are family, and there is no end of birds.
Birds may appear up close gripped by a healing hand or plopped down in the midst of chaos. It is a chaos at least partly of her own making. The confluence of humans and live animals may recall Surrealism, but think instead of Robert Rauschenberg and his stuffed goat. It looks more like Rauschenberg’s combines and collaborations or today’s collage and assemblage than Modernism’s dream state. Cut blue squares and paper strips dismember the narrative and bring the image that much close to the layered surface. It is less about representation than coexistence.
The very first work suggests the treachery of coexistence. A bird perches atop a mailbox filled with birdseed, as if the post office alone can no longer deliver. Well-worn letters lie near the same, and who is to say if their message has lost its urgency? The shadow of a plane hovers above as part of a rescue operation—unless it is an air assault or just a toy. Only a color snapshot pinned in the middle distance provides a glimpse of home. And yet this memory, too, is real.
For Soleimani, in the face of everything, the subject is dark, but her tone is caring and downright funny. For better or worse, she is just not a down person. She hangs the show against walls painted with comic-strip birds in a sketchy white and blue. More of them same sketches appear on paper within the photographs. Other handlers hold not birds but snakes, but they seem fully capable, and anyway they could all be loose paper models. Her parents are masked, while gesturing in pantomime, but it is all a game.
The curator, Elisabeth Sherman, leaves ICP’s larger galleries to Edward Burtynsky and includes only about forty works, through September 28. Yet it seems complete enough, because the installation and the photos themselves reach out across the space. The photos themselves, like the restaging of escape from Iran, reach out to one another. One image follows her to a safe house that once secured passages to freedom, with a glass chess set. Iran, it seems to say, has a past, but its future has only a few moves left. Whether Donald J. Trump can deny others a future is not up to her.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.