The Missing Archive of Loss

Abstract

The article examines the power of visual archives and the implication of their absence on the work of mourning. It explores the photographic work of the Iranian artist Azadeh Akhlaghui who retroactively assigned visual identities to the unrecorded death of prominent Iranian figures. The scenes of death reconstructed in highly staged photographs operate as the guardians of collective memory insofar as they enable the work of mourning, a process of reckoning with loss that ultimately frees the collectivity from enduring melancholia.