Alfred Seiland. IRAN : Between the Times

Collisions of past and present in modern-day Iran

As in his previous body of work Imperium Romanum, here Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland (born 1952) depicts astonishing juxtapositions, chasms and tensions between the persistence of the ancient and the transformations of the modern. One of Austria’s first photographers to work exclusively in color, Seiland creates images that feel both sensuous and political as he simultaneously addresses ancient Persia and contemporary Iran through its architecture, people and landscapes.
Sometimes the collision of past and present is shocking and sudden, and not necessarily attributable to modernization: for example, one photograph in the series depicts Arg-e Bam, once the largest adobe building in the world, which was almost entirely razed to the ground by a 6.6-magnitude earthquake in 2003, which killed around 32,000 people.