Book Review: “The Moon belongs to everyone” by Stacy arezou mehrfar
By Kelly Lee Webeck | March 17, 2022
Published by GOST Books in March 2021
6.5" x 8.8" / 112 pages / 32 full colour images and 25 images printed silver on uncoated black paper / Swiss Bound / Text by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
As a companion and as a celestial orb in the sky, the moon is a fixture in our lives. No matter where in the world you are, the moon presents itself in cycles. In and out of visibility, affecting our oceans and our moods. The moon has been a source of comfort and a source of mythology. It glistens and illuminates the evenings. It peeks into view during the day. It waxes and wanes.
This book too, waxes and wanes. Beautifully published by GOST Books, The Moon Belongs to Everyone glistens and reflects. The title stands bold and silver in large text on the cover. The hardbound book is small and portable, substantial but soft to the touch. Before even opening the covers the text block reveals a rhythm, a pattern of pages, which alternate black and white.
The full bleed images make this not a book about individual photographs, but a book that is in itself an art object and a journey. Throughout the pages we are brought in and out of landscapes, still lifes, color spaces, and portraits, but are never properly given a place to settle.
The piercing sun illuminates the landscape but so sharply that it obliterates the chance to see into the shadows. The golden light, the magic hour. The desire to cover my eyes. Even the photographs urge me to squint.
Mehrfar's story is that of immigration. Having moved countries just after the age of 30, this book shows the uneasiness of creating a sense of belonging in a new place. As viewers, we are guided in a cadence of landscapes that feel foreign and places that are unwelcoming. We are shown a far off distance, but never able to access it. There is so much beyond the viewer's physical sight. We are shown that which is never-ending: the horizon on the ocean, fog which conceals a pathway. Vast visual oceans of color submerge the viewer. These voids are not places to rest but a place to plunge and free fall. Even still, they are a relief.
Looking towards the sky, I return a few times to the image of the birds and the airplane. Inverted into a negative, these birds fly through the black void of the book, their destination beyond the confines of its pages. The silver ink on black paper depicts this sense subtly, as if illuminated by the moon itself. We do not ask where the plane is going or who is on it. Rather, it represents a journey and the fernweh that drives us to leave one place for another. Just as the landscapes are disconnected, so too are the portraits. They don't make us ask about the individual. We see faces of strangers and do not experience sonder.
The Moon Belongs to Everyone ends with a poem written by the artist. Through text she muses over what it means to be an immigrant and this sense is felt within her photographs.
"somehow different/
borders more disparate/ almost like time travel / to shift
...
memories transform / become odd and unfamiliar/
the place between here and there"
Creating a home in a new place builds uneasy emotions. It creates a flickering nostalgia for a place which is no longer your own and so you live in a place between here and there. Mehrfar never shows us where the journey ends.
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar is an Iranian-American visual artist whose works address issues of place and belonging, memory and narrative, and the symbolic relationship between the individual and the collective.
The Moon Belongs to Everyone is available from GOST Books.