photography
When Dead Buried Again
2018-2020
I have never read Invisible Man. Yet years ago I watched a film about an invisible man who became visible in the rain. Looking at Narges’s photographs of snow-covered graves, a related question emerges: under what material conditions does a ghost appear? What is the material screen, veil, or surface through which spirit becomes perceptible?
At first glance, the answer seems simple: in winter, graves are buried once more. Snow performs a second burial. But beyond this immediate reading, several visual elements recur throughout the series and shift the work toward a more complex meditation on visibility, matter, and haunting. Faces on gravestones are cut across by thick lines of accumulated snow. Inscriptions freeze over and become difficult to read, wavering between legibility and disappearance. Fogged and icy glass turns the image into a haloed apparition. Stone sculptures stand rigid and fractured, as if suspended between monument and dissolution.
The issue here is not merely death, but the freezing of the ghost. More precisely, it is the embodiment of the ghost within matter. The spectral does not arrive as something immaterial or transcendent; it takes form in frozen glass, in breath condensed on a surface, in weathered stone, in cracks running through sculpture. The ghost stretches itself between these two poles: the fragile opacity of misted glass and the hardened weight of carved stone. Even the fractures in the statues suggest a latent desire to melt, to return from solid form to the fluid instability of apparition.
One is reminded of Akhavan’s Winter: breath that freezes and stands before you. Yet the photographs do not fully surrender to poetic fantasy. They remain anchored in a material and realist field. The sharper question, then, is this: how does a cemetery appear in winter, more precisely under snow? It appears ghostly—yet not simply because graves are covered in white. A snow-covered cemetery alone would not necessarily generate this spectral charge. What makes these images haunting are the mediating surfaces: the iced-over panes, the fogged glass, the frozen writing, the interrupted faces, the cracked statues. Haunting is not contained in the grave itself, but produced through obstruction, condensation, and partial concealment.
These photographs suggest that the ghost does not emerge from some distant metaphysical realm. It leaks through matter. It forms where visibility breaks down. It enters through the crack in a small stone figure, through the seam between ice and inscription, through the blurred threshold of glass and breath. In this series, winter is not only a season of death and suspension; it is also a device of manifestation. The dead are buried again, but in that second burial they become, paradoxically, more available to sight.
Khalil Dermanaki
