Amak Mahmoodian’s *Zanjir* constructs a conversation across a distance that neither biography nor history can close: between the artist and Taj Saltaneh, the Persian princess and memoirist who died in 1936, decades before Mahmoodian was born. The exchange is imagined rather than literal, carried by the movement between two bodies of imagery. Nineteenth-century photographs from the King’s collection in Tehran’s Golestan archives alternate with Mahmoodian’s own photographs made in Iran, allowing archival record and contemporary observation to occupy the same unsettled field.
This structure gives the book its particular force. Mahmoodian does not treat the archive as a static source of illustration, nor her own photographs as transparent autobiography. Instead, the two sequences continually revise one another. Memories, dreams, absence, and presence become intertwined with the experience of separation from family and homeland; the past appears within the present, while the present acquires the pressure of what has been lost. The result is less a historical reconstruction than a poetic form of correspondence, attentive to the emotional life of images.
Born in Shiraz and now based in Bristol, Mahmoodian studied at the Art University of Tehran and completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales. Her wider practice examines identity through personal narratives shaped by experience across the Middle East, Asia, and the West. That background matters here, but *Zanjir* remains distinctive for how rigorously its ideas are made formal: through alternation, pacing, and the productive tension between found photographs and new work.
Published by RRB PhotoBooks in collaboration with IC Visual Lab in 2019, the 152-page first edition received the Photo/Texte prize at the 2020 Rencontres d’Arles. For a serious collector, the book deserves attention not simply as a document of Mahmoodian’s concerns, but as a carefully resolved photobook in which sequencing carries the historical argument. Its achievement lies in making two centuries and two women readable within one sustained act of looking.
