SCôP Conversation | Shirin Neshat named Master of Photography

- Editor's words -

Earlier this year, Photo London’s Master of Photography award was presented to Shirin Neshat. Now in its sixth year, the award honours a living artist who has made an exceptional contribution to the art of photography through a special exhibition of their work at Photo London. The award-winner’s presence if further supported by a headline talk given during the fair. Previous celebrants are the photographers Sebastian Salgado (2015), Don McCullin (2016), Edward Burtynsky (2018) and Stephen Shore (2019), the artist Taryn Simon (2017), and now internationally revered artist Shirin Neshat.

Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in Iran. She grew up in a liberal Muslim household and received a Western education, first in Tehran, and then at university in America, where she arrived in 1975 to study a Master of Fine Arts program at Berkeley. Neshat did not return to Iran until 1993. The experience, she says, “remains one of the most painful of my life.” The country had changed “beyond recognition”. Returning to New York, her home since 1983, she began work on what would become her first major series, Woman of Allah, portraits of women concealed behind a hijab or chador, which Neshat uses as a canvas upon she inscribes Farsi poetry and Arabic calligraphy.

Neshat’s most recent series of 110 portraits taken in New Mexico, which she titles Land of Dreams. Moving from door to door, home to home, Neshat traveled across New Mexico offering people US$20 to sit for a portrait. Her subjects include wealthy suburban and blue-collar white Americans alongside undocumented Hispanic workers, members of poverty-stricken African-American communities and Native American reservations. “I came across so much poverty, so much hardship,’ Neshat says. ‘But you can take people who are really struggling and put them in front of a camera and they become gods and goddesses. I found the most troubled people look the most monumental on camera.”