[Voegel-08-2009] from 'Flowers, fruits & portraits' series 2009

Iranian-born photographer Shirana Shahbazi appropriates classical art genres such as the still life to highlight the structural similarities between natural and constructed forms and environments.

Beginning her career in commercial photography, Shahbazi uses the attention-grabbing aesthetic of studio photography to challenge ideas of representation and replication. Alternating between abstraction and realism, her ‘Flowers, fruits & portraits’ series explores the iconographic and compositional elements of seventeenth-century European still life paintings and tazhib a tashiri, a style of Persian miniature painting from the Kajar dynasty (1794–1925). Combining imagery from both traditions, Shahbazi challenges viewers to see her subjects in multiple historical contexts, transforming them into new pictures that occupy a space elsewhere.