On March 3, 2023, thirty-eight people attended the panel discussion hosted by the Institute of European Studies and Department of German, featuring Peyman Azhari, an Iranian-German visual artist and photojournalist. The conference was moderated by Kristin Dickinson, an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan, who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
The interrelation between this artist and an intellectual explores the question of migration and home. Azhari started his photographic journey in urban settings, such as the subway of New York City, before shifting his attention to the Nordstadt neighborhood of Dortmund (Germany), the setting of his Heimat 132 project. Dickinson sought to connect Azhari’s work to the United States through the Visualizing Translation: Homeland and Heimat in Detroit and Dortmund in 2021.
Dickinson opened the floor to the visual artist by asking him how he started and pursued photography. Azhari responded that he started photography in 2006 during a trip to Australia, strengthened by his visit to New York City.
The discussion rapidly moved to his main project, Heimart 132. Azhari started in 2015 to photograph Nordstadt, a deprived neighborhood of northern Dortmund welcoming a high concentration of immigrants. He was first told to avoid Nordstadt, suffering from a ghetto depiction by the German media and far-right politicians. However, challenged to overcome his past experiences of racism, Azhari quickly started his project and exhibited his photographs in a Dortmund clinic sponsoring his work.
Heimat 132 was born about the 132 nationalities of the Nordstadt demographic composition. The exhibit aimed to understand how residents came here of their own will or were forced by the situation in their home countries. Most importantly, Azhari stated that having a place called home is essential for human beings to build their lives.
Azhari also commented on the design of his book and pictures. The cover features portraits of interviewees, and the first pages showcase the harsh socio-economic reality of the neighborhood. Many stories account for the beauty of his artistic work, including his interview with Party, a veteran of the Gulf War who has emigrated to Germany in search of a better life. His photos emphasize color instead of black and white and are often allied with sunlight to capture as many details as possible. Moreover, half of the 52 rolls of films ended in his book, where he admitted that he never knew how to configure his shootings before taking the shot on his camera.
As mentioned above, this motivated Dickinson to extend the reach of Azhari’s exhibit to the United States and associate his depiction of urban territory with Theon Delgado Sr.’s “Three Miles in SouthWest Detroit” This Visualization Translation exhibit sets forth transnational connections and racialized categories of belonging to compare the marginalized urban areas photographed by the artists in Detroit and Dortmund.