{"product_id":"and-they-laughed-at-me-by-newsha-tavakolian","title":"And They Laughed at Me by Newsha Tavakolian","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(231, 19, 19);\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSIGNED COPIES\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(5, 1, 1);\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eThe Failure Archive: On Newsha Tavakolian's And They Laughed at Me\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(5, 1, 1);\"\u003eThere is a familiar mythology around the photographic archive: the image-maker returns to their negatives as to a treasury, sifting for the overlooked gem, the premonitory frame that history has since validated. Newsha Tavakolian does something stranger and more honest. She goes back to her archive looking for the work she hated — the crooked frames, the soft focus, the compositions she had mentally discarded before they were even printed. Her word for them is \"eyesore.\" And They Laughed at Me began, as serious photographic projects often do, with grief. Following the death of her father, Tavakolian found herself unable to photograph for nearly two years. When she returned, she was not seeking consolation. She was angry — and anger, it turns out, is what led her back.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(5, 1, 1);\"\u003eThe choice of contact sheets as the book's primary visual form is deliberate and structural. The contact sheet is the image before the decision — before the editor's eye imposes hierarchy, before one frame is elevated and its neighbors erased. It preserves sequence, accident, redundancy, and failure alongside the keepers. To publish contact sheets is to refuse the retrospective authority that allows photographers to present a body of work as though it had always been intentional. At the center of the book is a single image that functions almost as a wound: a girl smelling a rose at a political rally in 2001, which became iconic — a symbol of hope and political innocence. Tavakolian came to hate it precisely for that reason. Iconicity forecloses interpretation; it can make a lie feel permanent. She printed the negative and tore the print apart.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(5, 1, 1);\"\u003eYears later, in the context of the female awakening sweeping Iran, she retrieved the fragments and glued the girl back together — placing the reconstructed print in developing chemicals, watching it change shape and color. \"When a negative is exposed to light there is no way of deleting it,\" she writes. \"You have to understand it, deal with it, heal, and move on.\" This is a statement about photography, but also about how societies metabolize what they cannot undo. What And They Laughed at Me proposes is that the archive of one's failures is also the archive of one's formation — and that the girl smelling the rose, torn apart and chemically altered, still wants to live. Not naively. But insistently, on terms that acknowledge everything that has happened to her.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kerher","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53568475464021,"sku":null,"price":48.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0573\/5016\/0524\/files\/and-they-laughed-at-me-by-newsha-tavakolian-9730051.jpg?v=1774907790","url":"https:\/\/www.tipi-bookshop.be\/products\/and-they-laughed-at-me-by-newsha-tavakolian","provider":"Tipi bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}