INMYX spoke with Jon Rubin and Andrea Grover, the organizers of Neverbeentotehran, about their project that asks photographers all over the world to think about a city that they have never visited.
INMYX: Neverbeentotehran is an online/offline exhibition that invites photographers to reflect on Tehran with their cameras, but it doesn’t include any photographs taken of the real city. Can you tell us about the concept for the show?
Jon Rubin: This past fall Andrea and I developed an earlier iteration of the idea for an exhibition in Houston. I was invited to create an exhibition in Houston and I realized I was not going to be able to visit the city or venue before the exhibition started. Since most of my work responds directly to the specific social conditions of a site, this situation presented me with a dilemma. After thinking about it a bit, I decided it might be really interesting to take this problem on and just stay home and pretend I was in Houston. Andrea was organizing the exhibition, and I invited her to join me. One of the participants in the Houston show was Amirli Ghasemi, who lives in Tehran and runs an alternative gallery there. We started discussing Tehran and what a contested city it has become in the media and how it might be a perfect place to re-imagine this project.
INMYX: You have brought together 27 participants from all over the globe. How did you select people to take part?
Andrea Grover: We asked trusted friends and colleagues to recommend participants worldwide. In order to increase geographic diversity, we also searched through Flickr sites for interesting photographers in regions of the world that we had not yet reached. All in all, we wanted to incorporate both amateurs and working artists who would contribute their own vantage point to the project.
INMYX: What is the particular challenge of this kind of exhibition?
Rubin: The challenge of this exhibition is for the participants to try to look for a common ground between their city and someone else’s, to admit to what we really don’t know about places we’ve never been to and to explore how our perspective of any unfamiliar place is always colored by our native culture and surroundings. To my mind, despite all these challenges, the show is essentially looking for moments of empathy, and as governments and media outlets are constructing a simple, polarized and distancing image of Iran, this empathy becomes a radical act.
INMYX: How do you think they reflect on the way we look at images of other places or form beliefs about “the truth” through photographs?
Rubin: All photos, even “documentary” ones, are fundamentally created fictions. In our exhibition concept all of the contributors are liberated from the false expectation that they need to speak about the truth of Tehran. It’s a bit like after you read a great book. There is a period of time when the story of the book bleeds into your own life. This daydreaming, in-between state, to which the contributors to this exhibition periodically submit themselves, is also an important way of looking at the after-effects of an accelerated information culture.
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Link:
http://www.neverbeentotehran.com
