Untitled #12, from the series Behold

Hoda Afshar is one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photomedia artists. Deeply engaged with the politics of image-making, her practice is a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry. Through work that is emotionally sensitive yet morally resolute, Afshar doesn’t simply alert us to injustice, she compels us to care.

Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Afshar has long been attentive to the way images shape our understanding of the world. She knows all too well how the camera has been used as an agent of control and how photography is implicated in histories of imperialism. As a countermove, Afshar uses the camera to tell stories from the inside and impart visibility to those from whom it has been denied. All the while, she remains aware of the ethical implications at play, establishing a dynamic tension between what is revealed to and concealed from the viewer.

The photographs in Afshar’s series 'Behold' document the covert space of a bathhouse in an unidentified Iranian city where a group of gay men sought refuge from an ever-present threat of persecution. In 2016, these men invited Afshar to photograph them, trusting her with the most personal of revelations. The images that result are a tender tableaux. There is nothing explicit here, only subtlety and suggestion. This is a protective gesture; knowing the potential ramifications for her subjects’ safety, Afshar toes the line between disclosure and concealment.

It isn’t just the way the men are posed – their faces, for the most part, turned away from the camera – that holds revelation at bay. The condensation that hangs heavy in the air enshrouds each image, almost like a shield. There is another texture that interrupts these photographs. When Afshar left Iran, she buried the negatives in her suitcase rather than in a lead-lined bag to protect them from being corrupted by the airport scanner. She didn’t want to draw attention to the kind of images they contained. This was another protective gesture, a trace of which remains in the grain that slightly pockmarks the surface of each print.