When trying to move on from painful experiences, it can be tempting to imagine that old memories can simply burn, fall away into a harmless ash that leaves nothing more than a temporary residue on our minds.
This is not how memories work, though. Rather, they simmer through us. Our thoughts, patterns, actions, beliefs, our cultures and our histories exist not in an entirely progressive vacuum but in our connection to what was and who we have been.
It is this idea of the durability of memory, of living an authentic history, that UNM Master of Fine Arts candidate and photographer Fatemeh Baigmoradi explores in her thesis show, “It’s Hard to Kill.”
From late September to early October, “It’s Hard to Kill” was housed in the College of Fine Arts downtown gallery.
A large, painted red stripe flowed through the venue, and shelves lined the walls holding roughly 130 photographs of people living in the era before the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The frames showed women socializing around a car, couples vacationing, family meals, religious figures — a menagerie of early 1970s Iranian life.
These photographs, though, have all been burned. They are warped into new shapes with blackened edges and smoky holes, missing pieces of information.
Born after the Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war, Baigmoradi said it was a time when “the economy and the culture changed. The atmosphere totally changed.”
Like the photographs, the ease of life before the pre-Islamic revolution was warped into a climate of war and high anxiety.
The fear of the sociopolitical upheaval of Iran during the time led to this secrecy, and with the secrecy came the burning of family pictures.
“Several families burned, or got rid of, their photographs,” Baigmoradi said.
In the living room of her childhood home, Baigmoradi’s family had a red photo album, the inspiration for the red stripe on the wall in her show. The cover, Baigmoradi remembers clearly, was ornate, but the pages themselves were empty.
As a member of an opposition group during the revolution, her father burned their photographs, like others, to avoid incrimination.
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“I knew parents got rid of some of the photographs after the Islamic Revolution,” Baigmoradi said. “I assumed they just threw them out. But I found out that my father burned them actually. It was about protection, but it was so aggressive.”
She, like many other children of the era, grew up living a double life, private versus public. Even in the home, though, her father spoke little of the past.
Baigmoradi immigrated to the United States in 2012, after completing her BFA in photography at the University of Tehran.
She spent her early years as a photographer capturing what she refers to as “portraits of objects.” These photographs explored her relationship with interior spaces, the places where she held history, like her childhood home.
Once in the U.S., Baigmoradi said she lost her subject, these objects and spaces with which she had history and connection.
“I looked at everywhere like a tourist,” Baigmoradi said. “I couldn’t trust my work as an art. So I stopped taking photos.”
Rather, she began collecting objects, beginning with a spoon she found in the street on her walk to and from school.
Struggling with the culture shock of her move to the U.S. and other personal hardships, Baigmoradi felt akin to the objects.
“Both of us were smashed,” she said.
Eventually she worked up to photographing these objects as well, in the garage of her house. This was a space that held no history for her, but the environment allowed her to explore the line between home and public, a dichotomy she knew well growing up.
In 2013, for a project called “As a Foreigner,” Baigmoradi began photographing herself in airports, streets and trains. This was a way to voice her challenges as an immigrant by showing her discomfort in these public American spaces.
It was through her homesickness that she started to sort through the old negatives she brought with her from Iran.
Baigmoradi found negatives of family portraits that had not yet been printed. After scanning and printing them, Baigmoradi began sewing on these prints in traditional Persian patterns.
It was a way of “trying to connect things by thread,” Baigmoradi said — a way to connect herself to her past and her home.
During her time as an MFA candidate she worked at the Bunting Visual Resources Library, which held a large collection of archival prints and slides until it closed down last year.
It was here that Baigmoradi’s interest in history began to grow, especially that of the Islamic Revolution.
“I began to look at the photographs during the period before and after the Islamic Revolution and comparing them. I wanted to voice my opinions on the Iran-Iraq war and this period,” she said.
It was out of these interests that “It’s Hard to Kill” developed.
Last year, Baigmoradi made a trip home for two months to see family and work on her project.
Because of difficulties surrounding her visa, her trip ended up taking nine months and delayed her graduation from the MFA program. Despite the stress and fear involved in her process of getting back to the U.S., Baigmoradi used the time she spent in her hometown of Kerman to her benefit.
Her father is now 81 years old, and with age he has become more comfortable talking about the past.
“It is the total opposite from when he was younger,” Baigmoradi said.
She began interviewing family and friends about their memories before the Islamic Revolution, as well as collecting their family photographs, which she reproduced and burned for her project.
Projected videos, which bookend the installation at the CFA downtown gallery, show her process of burning, using things like a candle and a torch.
One video shows the photographs burning, while the other in reverse shows them being pulled out of the fire.
“Burned photos are beautiful, but at the same time aggressive,” Baigmoradi said. “That’s something that looks to me like history; that’s something that looks like memory for me.”
Hannah Eisenberg is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
