Green Photographs: An In-moving Memory

In this paper, we look at the archive of the photographs taken during the 2009 post-election protests in Iran, in order to explore how these images continues to shape the memory of the events. Initially, the flow of the images from the protests was simultaneously targeted at the outside world to bear witness to the events, as well as at the movement itself to organize and comprehend its own scope. As all documentation was banned by the government, the protestors consciously implicated themselves, their subjects, and their audience in the political act of photographing and being photographed. This political act is ongoing in the viewing the archive of the images. Situating the photographs and the collective memory of the events in the present leads us to understanding the movement’s potential as continuously building, not exhausted through the protests, then documented and historicized.

Originally from Tehran, Iran, Mazi Javidiani has received his Bachelor in Fine Arts in new media arts and cinema from Concordia University. He is currently an active researcher at the SenseLab, a Montreal Based research-creation lab run by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Mazi’s work is composed primarily of new media narrative installations based on new cognitive philosophies and traditional Sufi and Buddhist practices. Mazi has also been an active film writer, specializing in Deleuzian philosophies, formal approaches, and Middle Eastern cinema.

Natalia Lebedinskaia is a second-year MA student in Art History at Concordia University. Her research focuses on vernacular photographs, and their shifting meaning in public collections. In her thesis, in which she discusses the Makortoff Family collection from the Doukhobor community in British Columbia, she hopes to bring forth the role of personal agency in negotiating between tradition and assimilation. Natalia’s wider interests include ethics of display and curatorial responsibility, as they relate to nostalgia, memory, and representation of personal experience.