Are we able to see poetry in chaos and suffering?

After long months of pandemic and suffering, the lesson Tahmineh gives us overwhelms us. Beyond the documentary photo, Tahmineh Monzavi's photos reveal a poetry, a sweetness hidden behind hardness, a sweetness of sister and friend in the face of the despair of these women. Echoing the work of his great predecessors, Boris Mikhailov and his clichés on Russian society at the time of perestroika, Dorothea Lange during the Great American Depression of the 1930s or even Nan Goldin, direct witness of the years of drugs and AIDS in New -York at the beginning of the 80s, there is always at Tahmineh a framing, a color, a moment of intimacy, a detail which sublimates the suffering and erases the unbearable.

Sentenced in 2012 to 150 lashes and imprisonment in Tehran for her photos of the shelter for women in danger, Grape Alley, she nevertheless continues her work in Afghanistan testifying to the stoning by the population of a rejected wife and the resistance of Afghan women to exist despite social and religious pressure. Even in the heart of the Lut desert in central Iran where a hellish sun raises the temperature beyond 70 degrees, she finds a female trace and her sun-destroyed dunes and rocks take on loving forms. out of an oriental harem.

Tahmineh Monzavi's pictures have always found a very particular echo in me, a specialist in the work of Auguste Rodin whose masterful work, the Door to Hell with its 300 characters, Damned of the Door and their executioners half beings humans half animals, asks us about the consequences of our actions and their weight at the time of the Last Judgment. Hell, hell on earth, hell in the hereafter. Moral hell. Hell for these women rejected by Iranian society, Hell of the sun that destroys even the hardest stones. And yet there is still poetry in Tamineh's photos.