Nedda Afsari

MUTED FAWN IS AN ALIAS

The work of photographer Nedda Afsari, or Muted Fawn, is widely known, and the two words serve as a perfect evocation of her life’s work. Almost. The words fit into a self-contained aesthetic that emphasizes the delivery of poetic truth over prosaic specificity. Likewise, her photos are not intended as open books to be read from start to climax, but as tuning forks that resonate against a viewer’s psyche and emotions.

The two words “muted fawn” conceal another, more personal meaning for the artist. They are words built from experience, emotion, and thought that remain entirely personal to Nedda. Evocative as it may be, the alias anonymizes Nedda, creating a barrier between her and the external world, hiding a fundamental part of her creative process from us – herself. Muted Fawn is a name that has followed Nedda through her growth into a formidable visual artist, but it is also a name she may leave behind one day. To understand why Nedda chose to work under this alias, we must first revisit a formative event from her youth.

A FAWN IN THE ROAD

One morning, beneath the sunlit forest eaves of Southern California, Nedda came across a scene by the side of the road that broke the monotony of her daily commute. Curled up by the side of the road, in the illusion of sleep, lay a freshly deceased fawn. Struck by a seductive melancholy, the firmament of the universe seemed to wink at Nedda, laying bare the hair’s breadth boundary between life and death. This vision of contradiction between youth and beauty, between death and decay, broke her heart as the words “muted fawn” coalesced in her mind, a verbal memento that remained with her from that point onward.

Many years later, the world has come to know her work by the name Muted Fawn, which Nedda adopted as her Instagram handle. Paging through the account, one finds a mixture of thoughtfully composed portraiture that draws influence from pre-modern erotic photography, high fashion, underground music, the occult, auteurist cinema, and beyond. Nedda has photographed luminaries from underground music scenes, like Massachusetts coldwave duo Boy Harsher and LA’s Drab Majesty, as well as internationally prominent musicians like St. Vincent, for whom Nedda recently shot the album art for the album Masseduction. Her photographs are ultracool and dripping with sexual iconography, so much so that a casual viewer could overlook the subtext that runs through much of her oeuvre. Fundamentally, Nedda strives to capture her subjects in deified visions of themselves, as fantastical bodies straddling the line between vulnerability and power, using the language of sexuality to her advantage.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Over the years, Nedda’s efforts have earned her well-deserved popularity, and along with that popularity has come misunderstanding. Press coverage regularly categorizes her work as “fetish photography.” While the majority of her work can be superficially placed within that genre, Nedda rejects this classification, citing it as a crude limitation of both the past purpose and future aspiration of her work.

Regardless of whether the photos have any erotic intent, her work is undeniably steeped in the visual language of erotica. Consequently, her models often appear in fetish gear. More often than not, the sexuality seen in the photos is oversimplified and over-interpreted, as many of the photos are more deeply concerned with the dynamics of power, pain, and divinity. For this among other reasons, the “fetish photography” label is ill-fitting.

Just as often, press coverage has labeled her body of work by the Instagram handle rather than by her real name. Nedda’s photographs are the artifacts of a highly personal process of self-growth, not just the sterile emissions of a fine- tuned aesthetic. She herself is the fabric into which the scenes she captures are woven. Nedda confided that reducing her investment in her photographs to an alias has left her feeling increasingly alienated from her own work. In this piece, we choose to dispose of reductive categories and impersonal aliases and shift focus to the creative spirit behind the photographs, on her own terms.

NEDDA AFSARI

Nedda’s formative years straddle two cultures, two continents, and two very different worlds. She was born into an Iranian expat family in California. Her father, feeling unfulfilled in the United States, moved the family back to Iran when Nedda was eleven. The cultural climate of Iran weighed heavily on her, and she grew into her adolescence under the pressure of religious austerity. Nedda was forced to take on the external indicators of piousness which compels many Iranians to hide their inner lives from the public eye. Between an all-girls school and being forced to wear a hijab, she often found herself in tears at the end of school days, feeling far from the life she enjoyed as a child.

It was during her time in Iran that Nedda was first exposed to alternative music and culture. She was able to feed her growing interest through contraband, like cassette tapes of bands like Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana that were smuggled back into the country. At home, a satellite TV setup provided a periscope onto the explosion of American alternative culture on 1990s MTV. Consuming these sounds and images could have gotten her expelled from school, arrested, or worse. But with the spirited irreverence of youth, she eagerly sought out these artists, daydreaming that one day she would be one among them.

After five years in Iran, Nedda and her family moved back to California, where she was faced with the culture shock of American high school. At home, her family was loving, but remained strict: no dates, no going out, and a nightly curfew. She had to find other ways to escape her increasingly uncomfortable constraints. She eventually found friends in school, gravitating towards goths, punks, outcasts, romantics, and transgressors – all building on her fascination with counterculture from her adolescence. Naturally, it was within these communities that she found stylistic roots for her creative voice, and where she found collaborators and admirers.

Since her return to the United States, Nedda has taught herself to be a superlative photographer. Her photos brim with style, sometimes recalling the extravagant drama of German Expressionism or the horrific splendor of Giallo film. At other times, her work veers confidently into the realm of fashion photography. The photos can be so visually affecting that we may find ourselves building bridges between our subjective experience of the work and what we assume might be her intent. In fact, Nedda assured us that she has no interest in dictating interpretation: she has no overt political point to make, despite her identity as an Iranian-American woman. Her investment in her work is not at the level of representation. Rather, she focuses on the much more personal level of self-identity. Photographing her models in intimate and transgressive scenes serves as an outlet for Nedda to explore her own relationship to power, pain, and femininity in the ways that were forbidden to her in her youth.

GEARS AND SPIRITS

Could we ever be so bold as to try and define what “Art” is? There are many answers, yet no consensus definition. One thing that can be said, however, is that a piece of art often describes the outermost layer of the complex rich inner world of the artist, a world shaped by history, intent, hopes, and intangible energy in motion. Artworks can be seen as a series of artifacts that give privileged glimpses into this inner world as it changes over time. These mementos may hint at what lies underneath, without being so gauche as to provide plain description.

Even without understanding Nedda’s internal world, her photographs are still wildly effective. The evidence lies in her success, which until now, has not relied on understanding the process and person behind the work. At SOVO//, we care just as much about the creators as the creations themselves. Learning about the artist behind a body of work provides a much richer context for the artwork, and so we believe that there is something to be gained from learning about Nedda’s creative process and her inner world.

Nedda starts her projects by constructing a tone board based on her myriad visual influences, or perhaps a song lyric, or a piece of found clothing. She often constructs collages to start mixing her ideas into a tangible object which she can then build upon. She told us that she enjoys this pre- planning phase, but what really excites her is the sharing of ideas with her model. For that reason, her spontaneous and unplanned sessions end up being the most rewarding. Nedda prefers using analog cameras, shooting primarily on her 35mm Canon F1, though she also uses medium and large format cameras. She sources her models from her circle of friends, and through a dialog with them, builds the intimacy required to shoot the scenes.

Nedda told us that she developed a strong sense of the rational and logistical early in life, what she herself refers to as “masculine” qualities, but her feminine qualities were not allowed to grow to the same degree. As a result, she has taken a carefully planned approach to exploring her femininity through her work, folding it into her collaboration with her models instead of putting herself front and center. When Nedda sits down with her model to talk about the shoot, she works on establishing mutual trust. This involves figuring out what the model is comfortable with showing, what themes they are comfortable exploring, and to what depth. This allows her to photograph the models in a different light than they normally see themselves, producing an aspirational vision that allows both Nedda and her model to grow together. Through this process, Nedda hopes to ultimately balance both the masculine and feminine qualities within herself.

Nedda’s inner world is full of self-realization and subconscious manifestation. When she moved to Los Angeles, she started to invest in a more magickal perspective towards life, paying attention to signs and symbols and with time, learning to trust them. Her approach to occult magick is one born of love and light, not of darkness. The apparent darkness of her photography might lead one to think that she ideologically embraces darkness as an end unto itself, but a closer investigation reveals her intention is quite the opposite. She has found herself surrounded by a community of primarily women with a similar worldview, which has helped her more fully realize her potential and the power that she wields.

Nedda has taken on the task of transforming darkness and fear into something transcendent. She has experienced night terrors for years, where demons parade before her bed while she lies frozen in abject terror. Nowadays, she welcomes these experiences as auspicious harbingers and inspirations. Most recently, she recounts being visited by a Victorian-era woman composed of half human and half-bat features, her hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms burned into Nedda’s brain. Nedda believes that this apparition appears not simply to terrify her, but to guide her to her own magickal power. The details of these night terrors have in turn, found their way into the visual language of Nedda’s photographs.

UNMUTED

The future is overflowing with possibility for Nedda. Just this year, St. Vincent’s album Masseduction (for which Nedda produced all of the photography) won a Grammy for best recording package. We could soon see her cross over into mainstream visibility, and her work and personal journey would become privy to a much larger audience. We believe it is of paramount importance to allow artists to be seen in the way the wish to be seen, as public interest in art is so often driven by flash-in-the-pan consumerism, treating artists and artworks as disposable items.

Our goal with this piece is to present the artist on her own terms, to allow attentive consumers of her work connect with her art in a more meaningful and sustainable way.

Nedda has been working on publishing the first of many photo books, and it comes as no surprise that she intends to name it “Unmuted.” She also wants to work on short and experimental films as well as bring together her music scene connections with her artistic vision in the form of music videos. With the intent of finding herself a wider audience, she has selected a collection of 36 works to present at solo art shows in multiple countries. Undoubtedly, Nedda’s work will be discovered by many more people over the next few years. She hopes that her artwork, charged with the energy of spirited self- realization, will inspire others to break free of their own restraints and realize their inner power.

— Written by Arjun Ray
— 4×5 film photography by Milana Burdette
— Installation by Farida Amar, Andru Perez + Viktoria Raykova
— Makeup + Hair by Erin Kiyoko
— Styling by Linda Wagner
— Creative Direction by Farida Amar
— First published in Issue 4, March 2019