Ashkan Sahihi (born 27 November 1963) is an Iranian-American photographer known for his unique photographic series as well as for numerous portraits of important public figures.
Life and work
Born in Tehran, Iran, Ashkan Sahihi moved with his family to West Germany at the age of seven. Although he began taking photographs as a teenager, Sahihi traces the beginning of his professional trajectory to New York City in 1987, a thriving "pop culture metropolis" where he could do the kind of photography work that he wanted to do, exploring the underbelly of the society around him. Taking assignments from German publications such as the Zeitmagazin and Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine, Der Spiegel, DUMMY and Spex, he photographed subjects like prisoners on death row, players in the hip-hop scene, and the downtown art scene of New York. Eventually, he began to receive commissions from American publications as well, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vice, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.
Put off by the limitations of photojournalism (the expectation that he would illustrate the writer's perspective rather than author a narrative of his own), Sahihi began to embark on independent conceptual series. In the early 2000s, Sahihi has lived and worked in New York, Istanbul, and London, producing bodies of work in each place that attempt to engage the political discourse he deems lacking in substance. Amongst others, he contributed to Istanbul Contrasts und Art and Patronage, both published by Thames & Hudson. In 2011 he followed and documented New York's Occupy Wall Street movement. After moving to Berlin in 2013, he started working on a large scale photo-sociological study dedicated to the cities women and two other series that subsequently were also published as books. He also had his work exhibited several times in Berlin. In March 2020, Sahihi photographed American drag queen, performance artist and musician Christeene for German Interview magazine. A large-scale retrospective of the photojournalistic work was published by DISTANZ in September 2020. The New York Years is a collection of 224 portraits shot in New York since the late 1980s, showing musicians such as David Bowie, 50 Cent, Solange Knowles and Nick Cave, writers John Irving, Siri Hustvedt and Irvine Welsh, actors Willem Dafoe and John Lurie, as well as artists such as Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Nam June Paik or galerist and collector Bruno Bischofberger. A selection of about 40 portraits was on display at McLaughlin Berlin in autumn 2020.
Photographic series
In his conceptual works, Sahihis main goal has been to drive forward public discourse on topics he believes have not provoked enough or the right kind of discussion: drugs, gender in the media, women in the military, etc. In his portraits, Sahihi often draws on familiar visual languages yet using them in contexts they are supposedly not suited for. Whilst constantly challenging the comfort level of both the viewer and the subject, Sahihi never removes himself from the line of fire; all of his work requires the artist to immerse himself in uncomfortable situations and challenge his own emotional fortitude.
In the Face Series (18 images), latex-gloved hands manipulate the subjects' features. The Hypnosis Series comprises 8 portraits of hypnotized subjects each experiencing a single emotion, e. g. helplessness, withholding/anger, or regret.
In 2006, Sahihi photographed himself in the homes and with the families of six ex-girlfriends and one ex-wife, imposing himself on the constellations that emerged after he had exited their lives. The Exes Series has been published in several magazines.
For the most well-known of his early conceptual works, the Drug Series, he convinced 11 non–drug users to consume a particular drug, then took their portraits over the course of their trips. The series was born out of Sahihi's frustration with the hypocrisy of the political conversation about drugs in the United States. "By attempting to present an objective image of drug use, the artist addresses the cultural politics that allow our society to simultaneously glamorize the 'drug look' in fashion magazines and the entertainment industry and meanwhile turn a blind eye to the complicated, and vast, problem of drug abuse." Sahihi has exhibited this series at MoMA PS1 in New York City in 2001, the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 2005, and alongside his installation 100 Million in Ready Cash.