Photography: Another Country, By Mitra Tabrizian

A picture from the 2007 series Wall House #2 (Mitra Tabrizian)

The work of the Iranian-British photographer Mitra Tabrizian is invariably concerned with the relationship between the individual and society; between the human figure and the background.

As Homi Bhabha notes in an included essay, "Who Are the People?", all of the action and the figures in her pictures occupy the middle distance; neither close enough to be portraits nor distant enough to be background figures. The result tends to be a strange stillness and a powerful sense of isolation. Other essays in Another Country, a monograph of Tabrizian's most recent work, relate this isolation of her subjects to a political and cultural stasis in contemporary Iran, although the book also has series in London and Holland.