| Field Notes July 2024, No. 145 Newsha Tavakolian Signature Drop #001: Newsha Tavakolian Tehran-based photographer Tavakolian is the first photographer in a new Magnum series, Signature Drop, a quarterly release of time-limited pieces, hand-finished by the photographer, and available for 72 hours only. This week, we join her in her studio as she reveals the making of the piece. Watch the videoGirl Smelling a Rose While going through her archive for the series And She Laughed at Me, Tavakolian came across a picture she took in 1997 during a presidential election in Tehran. It’s a picture of a girl immersed in the scent of a red rose, a first-time voter who was “full of hope, with a beautiful gaze.”“I printed that picture. I was angry and I ripped the image apart. Afterwards, when I decided to revisit my project, I was calmer and I had less anger. I saw that the girl smelling a rose wanted to live. So I put the image back together and then I put it in bleach,” she says.The girl transformed. Shapes and colors swirled and found their own place. As the image of the girl smelling a rose was processed again and again, the girl seemed to take on new agency.“She burst into abstraction,” she explains of the creative process. “Each time, she chose herself what she wants to be, and I let her be.” The interplay between past and present emerges through the altered images, urging viewers to look again, mirroring Tavakolian’s perspective shift from external observation toward self-reflection.“I put all these images next to each other because without one another, this portrait of a girl smelling a rose would not be whole. All of them, next to each other, the awareness, the anger, the consciousness — together they can describe a girl smelling a rose, not only a single image.” |
| Available Until MondayThe limited-edition print brings together the five portraits of the girl smelling a rose, and is hand-finished by Tavakolian from her studio. It is available this weekend only, until Monday at 9 a.m. EST, priced at $250/£250/€280. Shop the print |
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