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The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Mehrfar.
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Photographs by Stacy Mehrfar
GOST Books, London, England, 2021. 112 pp., 6¾x9x¾".
I have an affinity for libraries. I got my first library card when I was in the third grade and I have been walking up and down aisles and aisles of books from Albuquerque to San Francisco ever since. When you spend so much time looking at books en masse you begin to devise ways to find things that even the hip librarians would never think to pull. From a young age I quickly decided that my standard by which to judge (and therefore choose) would be design. The spine of a book is vital for this reason, and of a photobook especially. It was the outward-facing spine of Stacy Arezou Mehrfar’s The Moon Belongs to Everyone, published and produced by GOST Books, that drew me in; silver and seductive, sitting there, jewel-like, in a sea of flat matte titles.
The tonal qualities of the cover suggest an image made under moonlight, though in isolation it becomes surprisingly difficult to tell. The surreal idea of light without time is used as an incredibly effective tool throughout the book; tightly cropped, full-spread images show details that vary in terms of their scope, but the full image is never revealed. This method allows Mehrfar to retain some element of control throughout these pictures: these are the specific things that she divulges, but there is always more beyond the frame. Mehrfar tests the psychic agreement that we make upon viewing an image — our trust in the photographer’s ability to show us what was there that we (maybe) could not see until taken out of context. What the artist offers, is the corner of a room, is a monochrome abstraction, is a sewer grate, is the underbrush. What she does not offer are horizon lines, whole bodies, or structures beyond those that serve bugs (though I'll say that I love Mehrfar's images of spiderwebs included in this volume. I return to them often).
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Everything is zoomed in, hyperfocused, abstracted, disorienting. The experience of moving through The Moon Belongs to Everyone initially feels urgent, the images anxious in their need to stumble forward. This method of communicating makes sense for Mehrfar in the conceptualization of the project. It’s a meditation on the photographer's experience of migrating from America to Australia after growing up in an immigrant Persian household. The weight of the expectation to find a sense of grounding in a new physical place while simultaneously adjusting to psychosocial space concurrently is tangible. These pictures communicate the world as seen through the eyes of somebody who is forced to look everywhere at the same time. Although this sense of hyperawareness spawns fantastic images, the way that the viewer is fed these images — full bleed, tonally rich pictures, over and over and over — begins to weigh on my eyes.
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I can't help but wonder whether it was an effective decision to provide every image with the same weight through the uniform use of full-bleed printing. Though the construction of the book is fantastic, there are times when I find myself wishing that some of Mehrfar's images had more room to breathe. Her portraits of other immigrants from her community — stunning and slippery and uncanny in their expressions — are reproduced in luminous silver ink, mimicking the recurring details of the landscape in their print quality, are all bisected by the gutter of the book. In some ways the sense of claustrophobia that this imparts is effective; it is ultimately moving to see the portraits of individuals undergoing this major transition so closely. In a cultural climate that threatens a continuously mounting refugee crisis and forced immigration (alongside that which is voluntary), The Moon Belongs to Everyone provides a valuable and empathetic lens into the interior life of those attempting to re-build and re-understand what places called "home" look and feel like.
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