Book of the Week: Selected by Brian Arnold

Book Review Speak the Wind Photographs by Hoda Afshar Reviewed by Brian Arnold "The Strait of Hormuz is approximately 90 nautical miles long and lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. For centuries it has been a strategic point of power, connecting Persia (or modern-day Iran) with the Arabic civilizations of the Middle East, some of the former Soviet States, and South Asia. Roughly 30% of the world’s natural gas and crude oil pass through the Strait, making it a central point for international trade, and a volatile point of conflict, a portal for competing civilizations and interests..."

Speak the Wind. By Hoda Afshar.

Speak the Wind
Photographs by Hoda Afshar

MACK, London, UK 2021. 128 pp., 8¼x9½".

“They will haunt your dreams if you don’t 

give them what they ask for.”

From Speak the Wind

The Strait of Hormuz is approximately 90 nautical miles long and lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. For centuries it has been a strategic point of power, connecting Persia (or modern-day Iran) with the Arabic civilizations of the Middle East, some of the former Soviet States, and South Asia. Roughly 30% of the world’s natural gas and crude oil pass through the Strait, making it a central point for international trade, a volatile site of conflict, and a portal for competing civilizations and interests.

Photographer Hoda Afshar was born in Iran, and completed a degree in photography in Tehran before moving to Australia to obtain a PhD in the Fine Arts from Curtis University. Afshar is currently based in Melbourne, but her new book, Speak the Wind, is set on the islands that occupy the Strait of Hormuz and define the southernmost region of Iran. The book serves as a reflection on her life in Iran and the complex history of conflict and desolation that haunt the region.

Speak the Wind is divided into 6 sections, defined by passages of color or black-and-white photographs, and is accompanied by an essay by Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig, presented in both English and Farsi. The content of the sections is clearly defined, with the color photographs depicting the contemporary people and landscapes of the islands, and the black-and-white pictures reflecting the history and complex geography of the region. Two of the black-and-white sections also provide something much more haunting and cryptic. In these passages, the pages of the book are uncut across the top and contain images and text on the back side of the page, provided by some of the islanders.

The color photographs are dynamic, saturated, and stark, a mix of landscapes and portraits. The landscapes describe a harsh environment of jagged mountains, covered in salt and iron with no visible growth of vegetation. Instead, the landscape appears as though plundered by mining, unforgiving and depleted. Interspersed amongst these landscapes, Afshar shows people from the region, ghostly and desperate, alongside pictures of gravesites and dead animals, city ruins, and tattered copies of the Qur’an juxtaposed with an apparitional rendition of a mosque. Notable too, in my mind, is the use of the color red throughout the book, in a way that seems like a deliberate metaphor. It starts on the cover, with a red pool of water, and appears early in the pages with a ghostly red cloud in the ocean. The mountains of the islands must be rich with iron, as so many of the landscapes are covered in deep, rich red. In Afshar’s pictures, however, I’d suggest that red appears and reads like the American flag in Robert Frank’s great book The Americans, with the color symbolizing the blood of the earth and the complex, often violent history that characterizes the Strait of Hormuz; the last color photograph in the book shows a blood-red wave lapping at the shores on one of the islands.

The black-and-white sections feel more enigmatic, made with a much more repressed tonal palette than the saturated color photographs. The pictures represent a history broadly conceived, as the landscape in these photographs was clearly once a part of the ocean floor, with remarkable shapes and fluidity carved into the stark, desert landscape. In his accompanying essay, Taussig quotes Antonin Artaud in saying these geographic formations appear like the signatures of the gods. They suggest something far beyond human experience, both evasive and beautiful. Interesting, too, among these black-and-white passages is one interlude in which we see a human figure — not discernibly male or female — shrouded in a white cloth in an act of supplication or prayer, actions much more poignant amidst such an epic landscape.

Including the images and texts from the islanders, ghostly beneath the uncut pages, provides an interesting and unexpected element to Afshar’s narrative. Until as recently as 1929, Taussig informs us, the Iranians enslaved Africans. As slavery ended, many of these people took refuge on these islands. The text and images provided here reference this history. The images are crude, childish drawings of figures and monsters. The text, given in short and concise statements, speaks of mythologies and nightmares. Including these on the undersides of the photographs helps describe the experiences and realities beneath the lives and landscapes depicted in the photographs — providing a somber understanding of the violent history characteristic of the Strait of Hormuz.

It is worth commenting more on the design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown, a prolific part of the team at MACK Books. The pacing of the sections between color and black-and-white is beautifully constructed; the sequences of color photographs are syncopated on the pages –sometimes centered on a page, others placed at the bottom, and still others bleeding through the gutter across two pages – but always framed with a well-defined white border from the paper. The black-and-white pictures are full-page, often bleeding over from one page to the next. The combined effect helps to articulate the passage of time which lies at the core of the book’s narrative, each of the sections paced to offer a different sense of history. Crowcroft-Brown's design reminds me of some of the great, innovative work produced by renowned Dutch photobook designer SYB, as both designers help their photographers visualize complex, layered narratives with new approaches to bookmaking and photographic sequencing.

In his accompanying essay, Taussig concisely identifies some important historical information about the Strait of Hormuz, while also helping to decode the poetry of Afshar’s pictures. The title Speak the Wind, Taussig tells us, references both the geography and mythology of the Strait. As a cultural and geological confluence, the Strait of Hormuz carries the wind of many nations and people. As a mythology, the winds are believed to hold the voices and cries of gods and people over the course of centuries and are capable of both healing and possession. These ideas beautifully articulated in Afshar’s photographs, full of stark and haunting beauty.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, NY, where he works as an Indonesian language translator for the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. He has published two books on photography, Alternate Processes in Photography: Technique, History, and Creative Potential (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private and Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography (Afterhours Books/Johnson Museum of Art, 2017). Brian has two more books due for release in 2021, A History of Photography in Indonesia: Essays on Photography from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age (Afterhours Books) and From Out of Darkness (Catfish Books).