The Life of an Itinerant Through a Pinhole
In an exploration of the archives, of self and family, Behzad K. Noori’s The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole analyses photographs made by his grandfather between 1956 and 1968. Gholamreza Amirbeigi, a working-class immigrant photographer who lived in the southwest of Tehran, spent his days documenting the diverse, residential lives of his community, at a time of tumultuous urban expansion. Following the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran, the city experienced an influx of working-class migrants from smaller towns amidst economic hardship. Noori’s solo exhibition hinges on Amirbeigi’s auto-ethnographic methods, highlighting the historical and geographic reverberations of a bygone Iranian era in the present.
In a time-travel narrative, we begin in post-World War II Tehran, using a grandfather’s images of working-class agency to consider unconscious colonial memory and its formative influence on modern, global southern subjectivity. Central to the show is the display of the handmade camera ‘Rooh Kitch’ روح کیہچ, meaning Soul Catcher in Urdu. Its creation embodied the link between Islamic scientific traditions and the documentation needs of emerging postcolonial nations, serving as a vehicle for identity construction within newly independent states. Noori’s artistic investigation, composed of overlapping fragments, introduces and reinforces the necessity of itinerancy—not simply the movements of the photographer, Gholamreza, but of the image itself as it travels globally, disclosing latent histories, the residues of colonisation.
In this exhibition, Noori explores the metaphorical materialisation of the backdrop, presenting images that go beyond the working-class immigrant experience in Tehran. Through archiving, collecting, and displaying his grandfather’s images, he uncovers the erasure of marginalised communities and the potential for reclaiming these forgotten narratives. This microhistory, reflective of mid-20th century life in the Global South, serves as a backdrop against which our contemporary world is framed. He poses a central question: what will become of our collective past as we move into the future?