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Jalali was not only concerned with the interwoven relationship between cultural history and memory, but also with the generational responses to a particular historical narrative. In Images of the Imagination: Red (2003), Jalali featured negatives from the Chehrehnama studio in Isfahan, one of Iran’s most important photographic studios from the early 20th century. Jalali came across the studio after the revolution and discovered that its sign had been defaced with red paint, apparently in protest against the photographs of unveiled women that had been taken there. While the Chehrehnama photographs themselves were apolitical in nature and frozen in time, they were received differently by Qajar Iran and Post-Revolutionary Iran. Inspired, Jalali blended the negatives and overlaid them with red paint and black calligraphy, mixing time and space and alluding to each era’s reactions to the images.
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