During the making of his new photograph e book Wet Ground, British-Iranian artist Aria Shahrokhshahi visited a youth navy coaching camp, simply 30km away from the entrance line of the Ukrainian conflict. “In the evening, these young lads invited me out to this nightclub where they had dancing podiums and paid dancers. One of them got on the stage, took his jacket off and had a t-shirt that said, ‘big dick is back in town’. For Shahrokhshahi, this moment captured the sense of absurdity that often arises during wartime. “30km away is nothing. You’re in range of serious death at that point. It’s just that feeling of: what the fuck is going on?”
Wet Ground is a set of pictures taken between 2019 and the current, throughout which era Shahrokhshahi has spent intensive intervals visiting Ukraine and, following the outbreak of the conflict, working as a humanitarian volunteer. He first visited the nation when he was residing in Berlin, drawn by its thriving social gathering tradition and tattoo scene (a lot of his associates have been tattoo artists). In the years after the 2014 rebellion, which led to a change in authorities, the nation was “finding a new identity and really having its moment”. He says, “I went there, made a bunch of friends and totally fell in love with it. I was really fascinated by this new cultural wave that was taking place.”
He returned as a volunteer after Russia invaded in February 2022, which concerned evacuating civilians from the entrance line, rebuilding homes, serving to to run artwork camps and dealing with kids. The title refers to an incident the place he survived a drone strike whereas finishing up an evacuation of civilians from a front-line city, the place moist floor – within the literal sense – prevented a missile from detonating. A colleague, within the automobile with him on the time, misplaced a number of limbs.
While a lot of the e book was accomplished within the years because the battle started, Shahrokhshahi doesn’t see it as a piece of conflict images. “That doesn’t interest me – a lot of it anyway. Obviously, there are amazing war photographers like Tim Hetherington, but for me, his pictures aren’t really about war either: they’re about connection and love and family and loss,” he says. The battle is a presence in lots of of those pictures – a shot of a pair of bloody knees, for instance, evokes a way of creeping violence; one other depicts a bored-looking man scrolling via his cellphone beneath a wall of mounted weapons – however it’s not often the direct topic. Shahrokhshahi is extra within the duality of life in wartime, the moments of absurdity, like discovering your self at a battle zone and an orgy throughout the similar day; the “beauty in the everyday that exists within the chaos” and “what happens to a society when its existence is threatened”.
Wet Grounds is his first undertaking in black-and-white, a extremely efficient artistic resolution borne out of monetary necessity. “When I started this, I was pretty broke, to be honest,” he says, and the price of color movie had spiked on the time. Shooting with a large-format digicam, a color shot would have value round £10 and a black-and-white shot simply eighty pence, making the choice an “absolute no-brainer”. He used a flash in an effort to evoke newspaper images and to create the sense of “inspecting issues in an nearly medical method”.
In this respect, one in all his inspirations was Evidence (1977), a e book by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, which consists of images pulled from navy and police archives, repurposing photos which, of their authentic type, have been purely about conveying info and appearing as documentation. At the identical time, there may be an eerie, dream-like high quality to a lot of his photos: one shot, depicting a line of figures in white attire and floral wreaths holding arms as they transfer via a darkish forest, is each idyllic and sinister, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream crossed with The Wicker Man. “If you took a poem, and then you took newspaper photography, and they had sex, then hopefully the baby would be what I’ve been attempting to do with this work,” he says.
During his time in Ukraine, Shahrokhshahi realised that merely taking pictures and spreading consciousness about what was taking place “just wasn’t good enough”. Alongside his work as a humanitarian volunteer, he launched a sequence of magazines, The Sketchbook Series, which has up to now raised round £40,000 for NGOs he works with. “That’s extremely vital to me, as a result of I’ve been welcomed into that nation with open arms. It’s simply not proper, for my part, to go someplace and simply take as a result of, particularly with images, you’re taking one thing from somebody. They’re supplying you with an image, they’re supplying you with that point. And I feel each artist has a social and ethical duty to make use of their work for good.“
Wet Ground is printed by Loose Joints and available to purchase here.
