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Theory & Practice

The Story of Signature Drop #001

Newsha Tavakolian shares the process behind the release of her time-limited, hand-finished print “Girl Smelling a Rose.”

This month, Tehran-based photographer Newsha Tavakolian is the first photographer in a new Magnum series, Signature Drop, a quarterly release of one-of-a-kind, time-limited pieces, each available for only 72 hours. Drops feature collaborations with one or more Magnum photographers to produce exclusive items like posters or prints, hand-finished with signatures, writing, or other personal touches.

For her recent series, And They Laughed at Me, Tavakolian critically reexamines and repurposes photographs she took during the first three years of her career, from 1996 to 1999. Instead of her hallmark approach of fastidious image selection, this series only includes flawed photos. In stark contrast to the high-resolution, crisp photographs that she normally produces, these images contain “mistakes” made by her, her subjects, photo lab technicians, and her camera. These images prove to be rich starting points for creative revisions and evolutions.

“I went back to revisit my past as a photographer and to see my old negatives to understand better why I see the world the way I see it now. I traveled through my archive, not to pick the best work, but instead to dig up images that were never intended to be seen.”

While going through her archive, she came across a picture she took in 1997 during a presidential election in Tehran. It’s a picture of a girl smelling a rose, a first-time voter who was “full of hope, with a beautiful gaze.”

“I printed that picture. I was angry and I ripped the image apart. Afterwards, when I decided to revisit my project, I was calmer and I had less anger. I saw that the girl smelling a rose wanted to leave. So I put the image back together. I glued it together and then I put it in bleach.”

The girl transformed. Shapes and colors swirled and found their own place. “She burst into abstraction,” says Tavakolian. “I have used chemicals for some experimental images, but I never found shapes and colors like [this].” With just a spray or two of bleach, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, the image would transform.

As the image of the girl smelling a rose was processed again and again, the girl seemed to take on new agency, with Tavakolian saying “each time, she chose herself what she wants to be, and I let her be.”

The surprise and spontaneity of it all was immediately exciting to Tavakolian. She found that by giving up control, the girl in the picture and the chemical, together, were expressing a wish and deciding what sort of shape and color they would develop.

“I put all these images next to each other because without one another, this portrait of a girl smelling a rose would not be whole. All of them, next to each other, the awareness, the anger, the consciousness — together they can describe a girl smelling a rose, not only a single image.”

Of the five images shown next to each other in the final print, Tavakolian says, “The first picture represents naivety, the second is anger, the third is transformation, the fourth is the changes she’s going through with her past, and the fifth image is awareness and bursting into light.”