Newsha Tavakolian

Signature Drop #001: Newsha Tavakolian “Girl Smelling a Rose”

$250.00
$250.00
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Signature Drop is a brand new quarterly release of one-of-a-kind, time-limited pieces. Each drop features a collaboration with one or more Magnum photographers, producing exclusive items like posters or prints, hand-finished with signatures, writing, and other personal touches. Editions are available for 72 hours only with no surplus. Pieces are specially crafted for Magnum, emphasizing the independence and artistic spirit intrinsic to the collective.
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Description

The print is available for purchase between:

Friday, July 26, 9 a.m. EST
to Monday, July 30, 9 a.m. EST

All orders will be processed as quickly as possible, and are anticipated to ship by end of Summer. After successfully placing an order you will receive an email confirming your order. Once your order ships, you will receive another email that will include your tracking number. 

Straight from her studio to you, Newsha Tavakolian directly engages her archive by hand-signing and titling 16x20” prints of “Girl Smelling a Rose.” The five-image portrait from the late 1990s features a girl immersed in the scent of a red rose, her bright eyes fixed in a distant gaze — evoking a moment of serenity, contemplation and resolve in an otherwise turbulent historical era in Iran. The interplay between past and present emerges through a succession of altered images that urge viewers to look again, mirroring Tavakolian’s perspective shift from external observation toward self-reflection.

The images in this piece are part of Tavakolian’s recent series “And They Laughed at Me,” in which she critically examines photographs she took during the first three years of her career, from 1996 to 1999. Diverging from her technically meticulous approach to image selection, this series only includes flawed photos. In stark contrast to the high-resolution, crisp photographs that she normally produces, these images contain “mistakes” made by her, her subjects, photo lab technicians, and her camera.


For this, Tavakolian revisited an image she took in 1997 during a presidential election in Tehran, featuring a hopeful first-time voter smelling a rose. At the time, Tavakolian tore the print apart in anger. She taped it back together many years later and added bleach, altering the colors. This process allowed the image to evolve and take on new dimensions. Through each iteration, the girl in the photo was able to find her shape. Together, the five images capture the girl smelling a rose: naivety in the first image, anger in the second, transformation in the third, changes she’s going through with her past in the fourth, and the bursting into light of awareness in the fifth.

Specification

Format: Archival Pigment Print
Printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta paper
Size: 16 x 20 in (40 x 50 cm)

This print is for personal use only, intended for display in the home or other private spaces. For all other purposes, such as display in public spaces or institutions, publishing the image online or in print, or any other form of usage, permission must be granted by Magnum Photos.

Shipping

Please note that all orders are subject to any applicable local duties and taxes imposed by the destination country based on where the item is being shipped from.

Where possible these charges will be calculated and applied at the checkout and are the responsibility of the purchaser.

Shipping Time

All orders will be processed as quickly as possible, and are anticipated to ship by end of Summer. After successfully placing an order you will receive an email confirming your order. Once your order ships, you will receive another email that will include your tracking number.

All of our prints are shipped flat and separately from other items in your order.

View our shipping policy

Behind the work:

Newsha Tavakolian shares the process behind the her time-limited, hand-finished print “A Girl Smelling a Rose.”

For her recent series, And They Laughed at Me, Tavakolian critically reexamines and repurposes photographs she took during the first three years of her career, from 1996 to 1999.

These images prove to be rich starting points for creative revisions and evolutions.

“I went back to revisit my past as a photographer and to see my old negatives to understand better why I see the world the way I see it now. I traveled through my archive, not to pick the best work, but instead to dig up images that were never intended to be seen."

While going through her archive, she came across a picture she took in 1997 during a presidential election in Tehran. It’s a picture of a girl smelling a rose, a first-time voter who was “full of hope, with a beautiful gaze.”
“I printed that picture. I was angry and I ripped the image apart. Afterwards, when I decided to revisit my project, I was calmer and I had less anger. I saw that the girl smelling a rose wanted to leave. So I put the image back together. I glued it together and then I put it in bleach.”

The girl transformed. Shapes and colors swirled and found their own place. “She burst into abstraction,” says Tavakolian. “I have used chemicals for some experimental images, but I never found shapes and colors like [this].” With just a spray or two of bleach, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, the image would transform.

As the image of the girl smelling a rose was processed again and again, the girl seemed to take on new agency, with Tavakolian saying “each time, she chose herself what she wants to be, and I let her be.” The surprise and spontaneity of it all was immediately exciting to Tavakolian. She found that by giving up control, the girl in the picture and the chemical, together, were expressing a wish and deciding what sort of shape and color they would develop.

“I put all these images next to each other because without one another, this portrait of a girl smelling a rose would not be whole. All of them, next to each other, the awareness, the anger, the consciousness — together they can describe a girl smelling a rose, not only a single image."

Of the five images shown next to each other in the final print, Tavakolian says, “The first picture represents naivety, the second is anger, the third is transformation, the fourth is the changes she’s going through with her past, and the fifth image is awareness and bursting into light.”

Signature Drop #001: Newsha Tavakolian “Girl Smelling a Rose” is available for purchase for only 72 hours, from July 26 at 9 a.m. EST until July 29 at 9 a.m. EST.