Abbas Kiarostami: Photographs

Abbas Kiarostami: Photographs by Kiarostami, Abbas. paperback edition. ISBN: 9782850256738.

This collection of spellbinding landscape photographs proves that filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, whose The Taste of Cherry (Le Gout de la Cerise) won the Palme dOr at Cannes in 1997, should be similarly commended for his photography. Taken in Kurdistan and northern Iran during location shooting for his latest film, Ceremonie Speciale, the images here present us with the same mystical universe, the same clarity, and the same sense of symbol and allegory as Kiarostamis cinematic work. At the same time, however, we are struck by one major difference between his films and the photographs contained here: except for a single solitary dog, humans and animals are absent from these photographs-it is as though one of Kiarostamis films had been frozen, and all of its narrative structures and interpersonal relationships erased, leaving only these sublime and mysterious tableaux. This sumptuously designed book also contains an introductory interview with the filmmaker, conducted by noted French scholar Michel Climent.