Azadeh akhlaghi biography channel

Robert Gardner Photography Fellow 2019

Akhlaghi is an Iranian photographer and filmmaker working with conceptual and staged photography to examine events in the history of Iran.

Her previous work By an Eyewitness examined a series of deaths of prominent figures in Iran— including poets, writers, politicians, activists, and students—leading to the Islamic revolution of 1979; events that were never photographed.

In a heavily researched body of work, Akhlaghi creates large scale (huge didn’t sound quite right) montages that restage these key moments in a fusion of obvious fiction and performative realism. As anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney notes, “she deploys photography to illuminate key questions concerning national and personal histories, visual memory and evidence, and ultimately the manner in which humans construct their histories.”

For the fellowship year, Akhlaghi will be working on the post-production of 15 new images along with