Amak Mahmoodian: Zanjir and the Golestan photographic archive

Zanjir

Zanjir is a conversation imagined between the artist, born in 1980, and the Persian princess and memoirist Taj Saltaneh, who lived from 1883 to 1936. It is a meditation on loss and separation assembled from three kinds of material: imagery from the Golestan archives in Tehran, texts and photographs by Mahmoodian, and excerpts from Taj Saltaneh's own memoirs.

Mahmoodian first visited the Golestan museum in central Tehran in 2004 to begin academic archival research. The museum was once home to the Qajars and to the king's wives and relatives, and its holdings include photographs made between 1860 and 1896 by Nasr al-Din Shah, the ruler during the period when photography first arrived in Iran. Those photographs became the foundation of the project precisely because they support multiple readings — Mahmoodian decided to tell her own story through the stories of others, people who lived in the past and whose accounts persist in the present.

The method came from a private habit. Mahmoodian had long conducted silent conversations with family photographs, creating memories inside the image and inventing histories with its subject. Developing that further, she began photographing the people around her concealed behind historical masks — cutouts of faces taken from the archival photographs. In some images the masks accumulate to the point where she forgets the real face beneath, which is the work's argument in material form: the mask could be carried by anyone, and anyone could become a mask.

Separation as the underlying subject

Editing the photographs a decade after making them changed what they were about. Mahmoodian has written that the desire to be home and the sorrow of separation created a new narrative in the images — the narrative of her own life — and that the hope of return transformed the pictures into people she loves, misses and has lost. The subjects carry the masks of the past and remain present regardless.

The contemporary photographs in Zanjir were made between 2002 and 2019 in both Iran and the UK. Although the project is rooted specifically in Tehran, in the Golestan archives and in Mahmoodian's family, the sentiment it records is shared by anyone separated from family and homeland — which is why the book travels beyond an Iranian readership.

Zanjir was published by RRB Books and edited by Alejandro Acin, Mahmoodian and Aaron Schuman.

Identity, doctorate and earlier work

Mahmoodian is an artist born in Shiraz and living in Bristol. She completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales in 2015, having previously studied at the Art University of Tehran.

Her work questions Western notions of identity and expresses personal stories that open onto wider social issues, drawing on her experience across the Middle East, Asia and the West. Her earlier project Shenasnameh — built around Iranian identity documents — was exhibited widely and the accompanying artist's photobook won multiple awards and was featured in TIME, Foam and the Guardian, among others.

Both of Mahmoodian's major projects work through bureaucratic and royal image archives rather than around them — identity documents in the earlier series, a king's photographic collection in this one. The consistency suggests the real subject is neither Iran nor autobiography but the authority of an archive, and what happens to a personal story when it is told with borrowed faces.

The seventeen-year span of the contemporary photographs — 2002 to 2019, across Iran and the UK — quietly restructures the whole book. Zanjir is usually described as an encounter between a living artist and a dead princess, but the artist's half of the conversation was itself made across nearly two decades and a migration, so the photographs Mahmoodian contributes are already historical by the time she edits them. The result is a work with three temporal layers rather than two: the Qajar archive, the accumulating personal record, and the editing present in which separation gave both their meaning. That layering is why the masks read as more than a device. Every face in the book, including the recent ones, arrives from somewhere the person holding the page can no longer go.