Photography Book Review: Brian Rope
The
Fold : Hoda Afshar
Edited
by Sarah Chaplin Espenon & Hoda Afshar
Designed
and Published by Loose Joints Studio
Oversized
stitched booklet with quadruple-folded debossed cover
245
x 245mm, 228 pp, 435 monotone plates
ISBN: 978-1-912719-64-8
Hoda Afshar began her career as a documentary photographer in Iran. Since 2007 she has been an Australia-based visual artist and documentary maker. She has won various major awards, including Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize twice.
Afshar is a member of Eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers uniquely straddling contemporary art, academia and grass roots community engagement. Considered to be a most innovative visual artist of her generation, she explores marginality, gender representation, and displacement.
Afshar challenges the history of gazes. The gaze (French: le regard), in the figurative sense, is an awareness and perception of others or oneself. In this book, The Fold, she pushes the boundaries of photography, making it a potent instrument of disclosure and resistance. It is both poetic and committed.
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| Cover_The Fold |
In addition to the book, the artist’s first monographic exhibition – opening on 30 September 2025 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, France - Hoda Afshar. Performer the Invisible also unveils The Fold.
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| Performer l'invisible |
The book – and, I understand, the exhibition - offers a critical re-reading of photographs from the museum's collections’ archives, taken by the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan de Clérambault during a stay in Morocco in 1918-19. He attempted to investigate his psychoanalytic theories regarding fantasy and facial coverings, producing thousands of photographs of Islamic women, and some males, wearing the traditional white Haik garment of the area, which has now virtually vanished from everyday life there due to colonialism.
By exploring and re-appropriating that image archive, Afshar has questioned the way in which photography, used by dominant powers, has shaped - sometimes made captive – how bodies are represented. The Fold attempts to unpack de Clérambault’s ideas about fabrics, covering, and fetishism.
When she commenced scanning the archive, Afshar found herself unintentionally creating small square images of folded fabric and hidden faces, purely selected by chance. She decided to continue doing so, as a way of referencing the repetition, excess, and obsession with the fold – the very qualities of the Baroque period described by Gilles Deleuze in his 1988 book, also titled The Fold. He was a key figure in poststructuralism and, in that book, proposed a new and radical way of understanding philosophy and art. He introduced a way of practising philosophy that centres on the fold, exploring how difference turns inward to engage with itself.
This is the first time Afshar has drawn upon an archive in her work. Through the recurring motif of a mirror, we are invited to examine our own biases as we view these images, particularly in relation to the veil.
There are around 24 pages of text in the 122 pages of the book. They primarily comprise two essays - “On Photography and Orientalism” by Ali Behdad, and “Decoding Clerambault – Hoda Afshar’s Unfinished Quest” by Annabelle Lacour, plus a conversation between Afshar and photography historian Taous Dahmani. One brief exchange from that conversation focuses on the key issue of why the women in the image archive are not identified.
Dahmani asks Is their fate to be ever-linked with their photographer’s name? Afshar responds Yes, this is a difficult question to answer and the same one I had in making The Fold – the question of who is missing in this work. On the one hand this is obvious; the women who figure in Clerambault’s photographs. As in so many of the photographs taken in this same milieu, the photographed women are silent; we learn nothing about them.
The bulk of the book is images created by Afshar’s scanning of the Deleuze archive. Here is my small random selection of the image pages.
And here are a few individual images provided to the media for use:
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| Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press05 |
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| Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press11 |
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| Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press15 |
Afshar has also created a film which begins
with a digital animation re-imagining the scene of de Clérambault’s death – he
shot himself in front of a mirror. A camera focusing on his reflected image leads
into a sequence in which clinicians and academics offer their assessment of
him. An excerpt worth viewing is here.
This review is also available on the author's blog here.
