Hoda Afshar is an Iranian born, Melbourne-based photographer whose work treads the line between staged image and reality.

Winner of many awards, including the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize for her 2018 portrait of Kurdish refugee and activist Behrouz Boochani, taken on Manus Island, Hoda Afshar turns a lens to the issues of the invisible in our society and gives them shape and form.

Interview by Maria O’Dwyer. Photography by Mia Mala McDonald.

Maria O’Dwyer: Could you tell me about your upbringing and how it has informed your work?

Hoda Afshar: I was born in Iran in 1983, only a few years after the Islamic revolution happened and in the midst of the war between Iran and Iraq. My family was based in Tehran. The war wasn't affecting Tehran as much as the cities that shared borders with Iraq. But the fear was there; we could hear the planes overhead all the time, and I remember regularly hiding in the basement with my family every time the siren went off. The war lasted eight years and my childhood began with that tension.

My father was a lawyer and my mother is a homemaker, and both of them have been greatly influential in my life. My mother is a wonderful storyteller; my passion for storytelling comes from her. She’s been so supportive of what I do from the very beginning. Photography is her favourite thing, you know. My father has been the biggest inspiration of my life—his tireless fight for justice in a corrupted juridical system left a huge impact on me. I have to say his way of being in the world was really unique, and he has never ceased to inspire me—even now, seven years after his passing.

Iran is a society that is divided into many different ideological categories and hierarchical class levels. That affects everything, even your relationship with your closest relatives. It was something that always troubled me—the hierarchies, I mean—so I became more and more curious to understand what put some people inside and outside certain margins, and how values are decided and distributed. When I discovered photography, it became a tool through which I could study these lines more closely. These questions continued to interest me after I left Iran.

That leads into my next question. You moved to Australia about 13 or 14 years ago. Migration is such an experience of displacement. Did you find that also impacted your work as you were looking at things in a totally different way?

Yeah absolutely. Migration basically crushed my world. When I migrated, all of a sudden I found myself standing outside the “norm”. So, naturally at first, I turned my camera lens towards myself and my own experience of displacement. Being Iranian became a label attached to me. It comes with a package, you know. It’s like the society has already decided who you are and what your image and narrative is. I was curious to understand how those conceptions are constructed and what purpose they serve. That curiosity led me into a whole new world of research and practice.

I was going to ask about your current work, the style of which could be described as ‘staged imagery’ or ‘staged reality’. Does creating an image self-consciously help us to see things in a new way?

I was first trained as a documentary photographer. I was taught how to treat the subject and the story objectively and remove myself and my emotions from the image I make. The camera had to become invisible in the process of making. There is a strong belief in that practice that the less visible the camera is, the more the possibility of making an image that is “truer” to the story. At some point I lost trust in that belief.

Photographs are often consumed as documents that are supposed to hold inside them a piece of reality. For instance, we trust photographers who go to the conflict zones and come back with the stories of what they witnessed. But what we don’t realize is that the camera has a limited frame, and the image it produces also reflects the view of the photographer and how they frame and reflect on the event that is unfolding in front of them. The photographer chooses what to include inside the frame and what to leave out.

I’m more interested in challenging these established modes of image making and story telling. I’m in search of new languages. Using performance and staging scenes is only one of the methodologies I use to make the presence of the camera visible. For me it's about the trust between the image-maker and the subject matter, both in conversation together. How much of their truth and reality can be reflected in the final photograph is of course questionable, but I believe the look of agony, love and trust can not be faked, and ultimately that’s what becomes tangible in an image.

That’s interesting as we're in an era where photography is more prevalent than ever due to smartphones. And there are so many problems with sites like Instagram, where people think that these perfect images represent the truth of someone else’s life. But of course all these Instagram influencers spend hours posing! You’d think that in this era people would be so aware of the fact that photography is a mechanism for telling a particular story and not necessarily a representation of truth.

Yes, we are surrounded by images and our social profile is manifested through how we image ourselves now. The history of us that is being recorded in and through cyber space today is very different from the one recorded by the writers in the past. What will remain of us, more than words and written documents, will be the images we make of the world in great chunks. Photographs will replace words. That’s the language in which history’s being recorded today.

We’ve lost trust in how history was told in the past. We’ve been questioning the validity of those histories as having merely served power systems—colonialism, racism, patriarchy and so on. But is the one that we are creating now a truer version of history? I’m not sure. One problem is that we have all, somehow, inherited or become accustomed to using the same imperial visual language. We have learned how to manipulate realities through images in a way that is consistent, and quite damaging, but still perhaps invisible because it is the norm. It sounds cynical but it’s true: seduction and manipulation is an inherent quality of images.

People say that we're oversaturated with photographs now and that’s why photography has lost its ability to impact us. I disagree. I believe the reason why is because we hardly see or make any images beyond what we’ve already seen and know.  We are always drawn towards the familiar; it’s safe. There are endless new ways of seeing, but we only pick and use the one that is normalized in the mainstream visual realm.

What made you want to work on Manus and photograph Behrouz Boochani and some of the other refugees?

I became concerned about the refugee crisis in Australia when I realized how the government has been illegally exiling vulnerable men, women and children to remote islands in the pacific region, and how they’ve been blocking access and preventing information from reaching the public. It was so bizarre to me to see this happening in a liberal democratic system—and people’s silence too. Even more confusing was to see the system keeping refugees outside the borders of the country, while subject ingthem to its harshest laws—basically laws that are applied to the criminals and terrorists.

When the Australian government closed the camps on Manus in 2017 and forced the men to relocate to the new facilities on the island, I felt a sense of urgency to do something to help. It grew out of a genuine concern really. I saw Behrouz Boochani’s tired face on television and how he was trying to communicate what was going on there with the public, but his English skills were limited. It was then that I thought, we share a language, so I should do whatever it takes to help.

I'm amazed you could go there. I read that you just got in on a tourist visa … I mean, are there any tourists who go to Manus Island?!

I didn't tell [the border control officers] that I was going to Manus – if you say that, they won't let you in! I said was going to Port Moresby and memorized the names of all the touristy locations. I was like, ‘I'm so excited to see this volcano, and that waterfall’. I had no other choice but to lie, and I’m not proud of it. But it got me the visa and the next day I went to the domestic airport and jumped on the fist plane to Manus Island.

Your portrait of Behrouz won the prestigious Bowness Prize for photography. I read that when Behrouz saw the portrait, he didn't recognize himself in the image. What is it about photography that lets people access a version of themselves that they don't recognize, or that they don't know?

That response was something that challenged me at first—what did he mean by that? And that's why I put it in the artist's statement too, to challenge the audience as much as it did me. In fact, what really scared Behrouz in that portrait was how the image reflected the horrors of his reality,  to the point that he couldn't even recognize himself there anymore. He was confronted by his own trauma. He told me later that he sees all his fears, anger, fragility, power and resistance gathered in one image there together. It’s his gaze that mirrors it all – that’s what scared him.

On a different note, I wondered if you could talk a little about your next commission for the Photo 2020 festival on whistleblowing?

Sure! The theme of the festival is truth. For the commission, I decided to focus on my more immediate context—Australia—while still exploring similar issues to those I’ve always been interested in. I remembered a line from Behrouz’s manifesto, the one he wrote in 2017 and published in The Saturday Paper, where he said that if the Australian people close their eyes on this tragedy [on Manus Island & Nauru], they become complicit in it. He warned us of the emergence of a form of dictatorship that slowly grows its roots, like a cancer, and eventually creeps inside your house. He warned that it is taking root here in Australia—in our minds and institutions. Paradoxically, from his position—barred from entering Australia—he was able to see this better than us.

The illness is growing in the body of the system here and we see the signs of it everywhere. A good example of it is the government’s  treatment of genuine whistleblowers in this country. That’s what my new project is about—whistleblowers who worked within the governmental organizations, and, confronted by unethical or unlawful behaviour, at some point got over their fear of speaking out and exposed the government’s wrongdoing. All of them lost their jobs, received jail threats, their houses and offices were raided, their mental health degraded, relationships broke down, and so on.

What also interests me about this topic, photographically I mean, is that historically the identity of a whistleblower had to be kept hidden, while much of my work focused on struggles for recognition and the desire for visibility. Today, exposure through the media is what gives the whistleblowers a sense of security, they think now that the public knows, they are protected. But then they are faced with a public who prefers to remain blind to the harsh realities that they risked their lives to expose. A modern form of tragedy, really. So my challenge here is to capture the nature of this tragedy—the extreme exposure that causes blindness.

Sounds tricky….

Oh yeah, I've got the methodology sorted out in my head and I'm testing it out now. But we’ll see if it’d come out how I see it in my head at this stage!

And the photographs will be on display around the city?

Yes. In front of the St Paul’s Cathedral, in the heart of the city of Melbourne.

It's really exciting.

It's keeping me busy!