Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker
Trees and Crows
While the natural comparison with Abbas Kiarostami’s photographs is his films, for which this Iranian artist is celebrated internationally, there exists an equally striking affinity between his photography and his poetry. The poems in the collection Walking in the Wind (2001), each only a few lines, display the same motifs as the four photographic series on view at the museum—Snow White (1978–2003), Roads and Trees (1978–2003), Rain (2006), and Trees and Crows (2006)—sometimes more than one per poem: “The pouring rain / on dried-up trees— / from afar the shriek of a crow.” The relation goes deeper than such images: both photographs and poems offer a sudden, brief, but deep perception, and incidents of weather, season, or solitude that imply mortality.
Trees and Crows turns the usual relation of tree and bird upside down. Rather than perching on leafy branches or flying overhead, the crow is grounded, standing still and solitary at the base of a tree. Great cropped segments of tree trunks loom above it, each giving scale to the other. Though small and thus potentially vulnerable looking, the crow in profile is like a hieroglyph, asserting itself with the force of a message.
Trees and Crows is Kiarostami’s most recent foray into color. Despite their rich greens and earth colors, however, the photographs retain something of the stark impact of his black-and-white photography. Light and shade contrast strongly in the trees’ massive forms and in their intricate close-up textures. Pools or swaths of bright light lie beside long shadows on the ground. The crows themselves, a distinctive local species, are feathered in black and white.
Kiarostami photographed this series on the palace grounds in Tehran. The location explains the rhythmic sequence of precisely planted trees, while their massing, with no visible horizon, suggests a dense forest. He has mentioned thinking about making a film in which the crows (which according to him have a life span of over a hundred years) recall the comings and goings of the palace. For Kiarostami, the crow, then, seems a figure of permanence rather than the transience that the image of a bird more commonly suggests—and trees and crows together, nature enduring as human history passes.
Sherry Goodman
Director of Education and Academic Relations
Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker is copresented by The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in collaboration with the Iranian Art Foundation. The Berkeley presentation is supported in part by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.
