Beyond the Limits

Mitra Tabrizian’s photographs combine techniques from documentary photography, film and advertising to explore ideologies underlying the construction of cultural identities. As the philosopher Stuart Hall has written: ‘The images which comprise the projects in this book are indeed “fictive visual spaces”. There is evidence everywhere of a photographic practice inscribed by “the cinematic”. Some reference their cinematic equivalents directly — for example, the deliberate Takeshi Kitano/Tarantino/Reservoir Dogs echoes and references in the implied narrative of Tabrizian’s The Perfect Crime. However, far from merely mimicking the cinematic discourse of the contemporary crime film, or mounting a moral critique of its violence, Tabrizian unravels and re-works its “logic” from the inside. Un-framing the images from their Pulp Fiction-like locations and re-staging them, as she says, “within wider contexts of racial and sexual violence” allows the frames to become charged by deeper, more unconscious currents, permitting these powerful and eloquent contemporary images to signify “otherwise.” The racial and sexual edge, so thoroughly disavowed in Tarantino’s cynical, cartoon-eye universe, is restored.’