Stacy Mehrfar’s new photo book, The Moon Belongs to Everyone, is an abstract allegory for suspended identity.

The Moon Belongs To Everyone, published by GOST books takes an unexpected and highly metaphoric approach to immigration, diaspora, and cultural dislocation. Weaving through cold, blistering landscapes, found still lifes and deep dark, forest scenes, Mehrfar visualizes the experience of feeling out of place and the desire to belong and connect while mourning the loss of one’s roots.

The series responds to Mehrfar’s move, at the age of 30, from New York City to Sydney, Australia. An Iranian-Jewish woman who grew up in Long Island, she felt disrupted and out of place having never imagined living anywhere outside of New York. In search of connection, she also began interviewing and photographing other immigrants with similar experiences, ultimately making images that fall somewhere in between traditional portraiture and candid scenes – an apt metaphor for the cultural in-between.

When Mehrfar returned “home,” to New York City a few years ago, her feelings didn’t resolve - they got more complicated and her sense of rootlessness continued to splinter. Volleying detached portraits with shivering landscapes, she exacerbates this discomfort, the sensation of going in and out and never feeling at home.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Stacy Mehrfar

Jon Feinstein: The cover image is dark, chilling, and doesn’t reveal too much about what lies beyond (in a way that entices me to look deeper.) What's the story behind this image as it relates to your story of immigration and feeling out of place?

Stacy Mehrfar: The photograph was made in New York, just after the dead of winter, when trees are suspended in waiting for Spring. The book cover functions as an invitation to join me in an unfamiliar, perhaps even suspect, place; a place that exists at the intersection between origin and destination.

A flip through preview of the photobook, The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, published by GOST Books, London, March 2021

Feinstein: The Moon Belongs To Everyone is abstract, and non-linear in its representation of immigration and your experience. How did it come about as a project? Did you have the idea and then set out to find/make the visual metaphors or did you start seeing those metaphors within images you were already making/ along the way?

Mehrfar: I don’t know that I can describe the experience of making this work in a linear way so here’s a story that I hope gives some insight into my process. In the very beginning, when I was just starting to conceptualize the ideas within The Moon Belongs to Everyone, I was making banal documentary images of my every day. Taking walks around various suburbs of Sydney, I was using the camera to discover, really to interrogate, my new homeland.

I became obsessed with the flowers I came across on these walks. Flowers bloom everywhere in Sydney. These are not just any mundane flowers, they’re the sort of flowers I grew up knowing as “exotic,” the ones one could only find in a fancy florist at a very specific time of year. But here these flowers were in my neighbors’ yards and on the trees that line suburban streets. I was captivated by their audacity, their boldness in color.

Seeing these brilliant flowers every day brought me to think about color as a trigger of memory. I was also thinking about the nature of color photography and how color in a photograph is inherently dubious and subjective. I wanted to explore these ideas further, so I placed my Hasselblad lens directly in the bulb of flower heads, filling my frame with these bursts of reds, oranges, greens, even the sacred yellowish whites of frangipanis’. All but one of the color fields in the book are from those initial flower explorations. It was these sorts of inquiries that pushed me to make more poetic photographs.

Feinstein: For me, growing up as a millennial NYC grandchild-of-the-holocaust Jew, "diaspora" was always in the background of my identity. It’s as if out-of-place-ness is sewn into our identities from the start. This is one of the reasons I connect so much with this work.

While I don't want to project my own experience onto yours (actually, maybe I do!), I'm curious if this idea fits into your experience?

Mehrfar: I was born in New York, but as the child of Iranian immigrants I grew up knowing I was something other than “American.” Our connection to Iran and Israel, the proverbial faraway lands, was a constant theme at family gatherings.

But as a child, it was the social theater that often had the biggest implications. My family’s home didn’t look like other homes in our neighborhood. Rather, it was filled with ornate furniture, the sounds of Farsi, and the smells of Fenugreek. I remember being embarrassed to have friends over because they would often say “Your house smells funny.”

Feinstein: Your portraits fit into this discussion in an unexpected way – they feel like chapter markers, stand-ins for a universal feeling of cultural disorientation. I think less about who the people are and more about what they represent as figures amidst these dark, cold landscapes.

Mehrfar: I interviewed all of the people I photographed before and during our sessions. Through our conversations it became clear that regardless of our specific personal histories, we had all experienced a similar sense of loss in the wake of migration, and that we shared a common desire for belonging and community.

We spoke a lot about living in a limbo space. Picturing the people as a series of averted, subconscious gazes, became a way to survey these emotions. The individuals exist in parallel indeterminate backgrounds. We can think of them as both alone and together, located anywhere and everywhere. When viewed in sequence, they become abstract representations, a metaphor for a community not defined by borders.

Feinstein: That being said, who are the people in the photographs, and what is your relationship to them?

Mehrfar: The portraits present a diverse set of individuals who moved to Australia from all four corners of the world. They are friends, friends of friends, and people I met along the way.

Feinstein: I notice that in other places beyond this book, many of the same portraits that are in the book are in color, yet here, you choose to show them in black and white.

Mehrfar: The Moon Belongs to Everyone was originally conceived and exhibited as an 8-channel video work. In the video, the portraits appear and disappear like an alternating kaleidoscope. I was consciously thinking about the power of montage, and how the still portrait functions when experienced on screen, juxtaposed and weaved together through motion pictures. The ideas of montage continue through the sequencing of the book, but here there is also the movement between black & white and color signatures.

Stuart Smith, the brilliant mind behind GOST Books, and I decided to convert the portraits to black and white and to place them together consecutively in sequence. The idea was that in presenting them this way, these images become less about the individuals and more about a collective consciousness.

Feinstein: The images alternate between dark, heavy, black and white landscapes, details, and still lifes, punctuated by short bursts of color. This kind of volley doesn't always work with a lot of photographers, but it sits well with me here as I weave through it. Can you talk a bit about this decision in your editing process/ conceptually?

Mehrfar: David Bordwell, one of my Professors at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, introduced me to the film theory of Sergei Eisenstein. In his books of essays, Film Sense and Film Form, Eisenstein considers montage as a dynamic collision of pictures. He compares film editing to music and promotes the ways in which montage can work to affect a viewer's emotional and cognitive response to the film’s narrative.

With full-bleed spreads from beginning to end, the photobook operates like a self-contained universe, while the sequence performs like a musical score. The arrangements of color, pattern, and figure carry tempo, breath, and rhythm throughout each section of the book. Black and white images are printed on black paper with silver ink, reinforcing the notion of being ungrounded. Eisenstein's theories continue to resonate with me, and in many ways informed these decisions.

Feinstein: Your work seems to be gradually getting darker and more richly abstract over the years. I think back to your American Palimpsests series from over a decade ago, and then to Tall Poppy Syndrome, your collaborative project and book with Amy Stein.

Mehrfar: My process has always been to photograph through inquiry and personal histories, and with this in mind, I would say that the stylistic shift was very much a response to the physical and emotional experience of migrating. The light, the landscape, the vegetation – was nothing like the land I knew. Even the English we spoke was different – words and gestures no longer carried the same meanings. For me this book is very much an exploration of this – how does migration affect our perceptions of place, time, identity? How does landscape inform our ways of seeing?

But then I come back to the common thread which runs throughout my practice, which is an investigation of ‘community.’ We can see this theme play out in American Palimpsests, Tall Poppy Syndrome, A Collective Performance, and here in The Moon Belongs to Everyone. Each project informs the next and as my practice expands, so do the ways in which I push the boundaries of visual language.

Feinstein: I keep coming back to the birds and the airplane - one of my favorite images in the series. What's the story behind it? Is it a "straight" image?

Mehrfar: The photograph of the birds and airplane, entitled “The Moon Belongs to Everyone #5,” was made in Centennial Park, Sydney. I spent a few early evenings there producing video clips of bats flying over the city. The bats travel through the park just before dusk. This image was made during one of those sessions, while I was waiting for the bats to arrive.

Feinstein: Ah! Bats - there is definitely something mysteriously batlike about the birds! What's also interesting to me about it is that it's probably the one image that is both heavy and a little humorous. Would you agree?

Mehrfar: Yes, I fell in love with the bats in Sydney. They’re such mysterious creatures. It's become an emblematic image — I'm really glad you picked up on it, and I love that you see the humor. I think that is one of the hardest things to do in photography – to make humorous pictures that also make you think. To answer your question, I’m not sure if it qualifies as a straight image. It is documentary in nature, in that I captured a moment as it happened, however, the file has been inverted to reframe the viewer's perception of day/night.

Feinstein: Where were all of these images made, and how much does that location matter to the larger idea of the book and series?

Mehrfar: The images were made in New York state and all through the east coast of Australia. These specificities are not of any real importance except for the fact that they are the two places I live between. In terms of how the project functions though, it is important that the landscapes are indistinguishable. The convergence of the two very different environments allowed me to create a sort of “other” space that only exists in the world of The Moon Belongs to Everyone.

Feinstein: Did this work give you any resolve or open new questions for you? And does seeing it in its final book form change/ enrich/ layer how you think about your experience + identity?

Mehrfar: Making this work enriched how I think about the photobook object. The Moon Belongs to Everyone is not just a collection of my most successful pictures. What excites me is the way the pictures work together in book form to create meaning – the book is an artwork in and of itself. I really enjoyed the process of making this object one can hold and feel and experience like an experimental film.

Feinstein: Thanks so much for your time and trust, Stacy. Aside from the book (hey Humble readers: if you’ve gotten this far, go buy Stacy’s book. You can get a signed copy HERE), do you have anything else coming up that our readers should be aware of?

Mehrfar: I’ll be participating in a virtual talk at ICP on March 30th with a few other artists discussing the process of making work during the pandemic. Details are HERE.

A Lunar Metaphor for Migration, Diaspora, and Disorientation