We created PhotoVogue Festival Echoes to allow those who participated in the event to contribute their voices to the Festival s narrative. During those days in Milan, we recognised our community s desire to come together and draw inspiration from each other s works. We highly value the sharing of experiences and practices, firmly believing that providing dedicated space to each artist can appropriately acknowledge the outstanding projects exhibited in November at the PhotoVogue Festival.
Carmen Daneshmandi is the protagonist of the 10th episode of PhotoVogue Festival Echoes. She participated at the PhotoVogue Festival in Milan in the exhibition ‘Spanish Women: A contemporary portrait of Strength and Beauty’. Her project is a selection of the works she created across Sevilla, Zaragoza, Barcelona and New York. The womxn portrayed in her photographs represent with their strength her own strength coming from her multicultural heritage and the desire for experimentation in her practice.
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1. What is your favorite memory of the PhotoVogue Festival 2023?
Honestly forming so many sweet connections with community from all over! I know that word gets thrown around a lot but often in these spaces it can feel conditional. Who do you know, what do you look like, what can you do for me. It doesn’t transcend the aesthetic to something real. It s like a sticker. Comes right off. PhotoVogue felt light and authentic, and for everyone. We could geek out on art things or just show up to a meal at someone s home where you know no one but everything was with walls down. We talk with eye contact, you feel the warmth. We lifted each other up and kept in touch. That’s a beautiful thing.
2. How does your multicultural upbringing influence your work?
Color! Texture! Patterns! Sound! Something about minimalism and whiteness comes to mind. The pitch that you hear in a call to prayer at a mosque is the same as the pitch of a flamenco song. I don’t take that lightly. Everything is material, everything is collage. My dad is from Shiraz, Iran and my mom is from Sevilla, Spain and my childhood was a constant juxtaposition of culture at home and culture out in the world in Seattle. My mom used to have a flamenco dance group in the 90’s called Canela en Rama and they’d have parties in the backyard when most of the neighbourhood was quiet inside. They would perform at churches and malls and it used to embarrass me but now I understand what she was doing. Her form of world building with her people. Everything - faith, food, music, gestures - coexisted and complemented each other in such a special way. But growing up I didn’t know what to do with that energy. I was scared to lean into it, until I started to explore my relationship to the world through image-making. Tone is a visual and spiritual vessel for sure.
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3. Your photography has strong elements of fantasy. How do you think fantasy can help change reality and serve as a vehicle for “both personal and collective transformation”, as you said?
If I make an image of you towering over a highway fire with a dress made of candle wax I make sure that the lines of these images blend to seem like they are from the same time and place. I am seeing you as otherworldly, unstoppable, beautiful but I really want that to be believable. I am thinking of traditions of fire jumping to cleanse energies for Persian new year and thinking of historical sculpture. Choosing to be playful and infuse power into an image of someone despite how many times you’ve seen otherwise is important. But I also see it as something much less structured than “change I want to see” and creating from a space of intuition and deep knowing when the world tries to destroy our spirt, individually and collectively. I say world building a lot to myself and that feels safe and in line with how I want to feel when I make my work. Fantasy feels like the product of intuition and I think creating imagery tapped into that only makes us stronger.
4. Is there an upcoming project you are working on?
Yes! Every year I do this self-published personal project called the Calendar Zine. It’s this spiral-bound zine with personal writing and original imagery that decolonizes the standard calendar to refocus its dates of importance to often overlooked communities. I’ve been distributing it via word of mouth on my IG stories for the past four years and I am amazed at the reach it s gotten! For the fifth year I want to do something really special to honour it. Some sort of living, breathing iteration of what the zine would be like as an experience off the page, some sort of community activation. And of course all new shoots to create images from! Lots of grant applications await me in the upcoming months haha. Keep an eye out! It’s gonna be cute.
