Snow White 

This is an untitled photograph from the series "Snow White," by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami, working in a nation with a complex and often fraught relationship to representation, offers us a deceptively simple scene: trees in the snow. The monochrome palette and stark composition evoke a sense of isolation and quiet contemplation. But this is not merely a landscape; it is a meditation on the very act of seeing. Kiarostami once said, "I prefer to remain mysterious, even for myself." The dense, snow-covered ground flattens the perspective, turning the trees into graphic forms against a white void. The repetition of the trees creates a rhythm, a visual poem. The title "Snow White" hints at the fairy tale, a world of innocence and danger. Yet, here, the Brothers Grimm tale is stripped bare, leaving us with the raw elements of nature. What does it mean to see a landscape through the lens of a fairy tale? Perhaps it is an invitation to find the mythic in the mundane, to recognize the stories embedded in the world around us.