Harboured Memories

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              "text": "The remnants of a dilapidated dock lie next to Lake Urmia.",
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              "text": "This 36-year-old photograph was taken at Sharafkhaneh port, in the East Azerbaijan province. It shows Solmaz Daryani’s grandfather, and her uncle, who is rowing the boat. They are accompanied by guests from Tehran.",
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              "text": "Children from a village beside Lake Urmia play on the barren lakeshore.",
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              "text": "Seyed Agha Ghasemi, Daryani’s grandfather, used to own a motel on the coast and made his living by renting rooms and offering swan-boat rides to the many tourists who frequented the area. As Lake Urmia dried up, tourism and agriculture waned. The motel has been vacant and the swan boats left unused for years.",
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              "text": "Daryani’s grandfather’s motel, which used to be perpetually busy, is now empty and ruined.",
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              "text": "Fragments of salt crystals, formed as a result of evaporation, are visible in some parts of Lake Urmia.",
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              "text": "Daryani’s grandmother found thistle with salt crystals and uses it as an ornament in her home at Sharafkhaneh port.",
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              "text": "Daryani’s grandmother used to keep a record of emergency numbers in a notebook. Since she could not read, she used drawings to denote the contacts’ professions.",
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              "text": "A childhood photograph of Daryani, pictured on the right in a black-andwhite dress, and her brother standing beside her in a striped shirt. Daryani recalled that this was taken in 1991, during one of the family’s frequent weekend visits to the lake.",
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              "text": "In an effort to prevent salt storms, the Urmia lake restoration department planted trees on part of the lake bed that has completely dried up. White-collar staff visiting the site now park their cars at this point.",
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              "text": "A man cakes himself with mud, near Lake Urmia. The soil in the area is considered to be rich in minerals, including iodine and iron, and tourists often engage in mud therapy.",
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              "text": "In 2016, Lake Urmia showed some signs of recovery in certain regions, following a bout of heavy rainfall and the opening of the Boukan dam. People used to take pictures from an abandoned ship, which was surrounded with salt for kilometres. It is now surrounded by water again. The lake is far from making a complete recovery, however.",
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              "text": "As Sharafkhaneh port now has fewer visitors, police presence in the area dwindled, and women who previously had to swim in a separate enclosed area then had the chance to swim in a shallow pond. They walked nearly three kilometres from the coast to the pond several times each summer to bathe in salt water. This photo was taken in 2014, when there was still some water near the port, but that has now dried up as well.",
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              "text": "Golmankhaneh port in West Azerbaijan was once the main port on Lake Urmia, with coastal beaches and villas that hosted travellers. Today it is only a desolate outpost with a salt crust.",
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              "text": "The population of Galgachi, a village in West Azerbaijan, decreased from 300 to 100 households, after the lake began to shrink.",
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              "text": "This photograph, which was taken around thirty years ago, shows Daryani’s grandmother in her garden in Sharafkhaneh Port. The garden used to have almond trees and grape vines which have stopped growing now because of the salinity of the soil, and Daryani’s grandmother now rents out the garden.",
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A GROUP OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS, perched on a sunlit boat in the water, stare back at the camera in an image in Solmaz Daryani’s project “The Eyes of Earth.” The photograph was taken 36 years ago at Sharafkhaneh port, East-Azerbaijan province—a region that used to be a bustling spot for visitors to Lake Urmia, a salt lake in northwest Iran. Daryani’s maternal family lived and worked in the area, and the photograph features her grandfather, who owned a motel, and her uncle, who was a sailor. Another image, taken by Daryani in 2015, shows young boys in the same region, but the landscape is unrecognisably different. Much of the lake pictured in the first image has dried up, leaving behind a dusty and barren shore. One boy balances precariously on a rusty boat, the very presence of which seems incongruous because of the missing water. The warmth of the first photograph, which looks like a cheerful family outing, is entirely absent from this stark image of isolation.

When Daryani contemplates what has happened to Lake Urmia, she arrives at the present after a detour through the past. She intersperses a few photographs from the 1970s, unearthed from old family albums, with recent photographs of the region. The contrast is a graphic reminder that the lake and its surroundings were once idyllic and beautiful, had flourishing ecological life, and that its slow dessication has affected several generations.

Urmia—formerly the second-largest salt lake in West Asia—shrank by nearly 80 percent over thirty years. Although recent rainfall has helped the lake revive a little, the drying up was the result of drought triggered by climate change. Illegal wells and construction have also taken their toll, according to Daryani: the Shahid Kalantari highway, for instance, involved drying up 85 percent of the boundary between the western and eastern sides of the lake. This has threatened the habitat of species that were found in the area, such as the brine shrimp and the egret. “The lake’s ducks, flamingos and pelicans have vanished, too,” Daryani added.

There has been an exodus of people from the region too. The population of villages surrounding the lake dwindled, and Daryani’s grandfather’s children left to work elsewhere. In Daryani’s recollections, her family’s weekly routine revolved around the lake. They used to gather at the bridge for dinner on one day a week, and spent Thursdays and Fridays swimming, rowing in swan paddle boats and helping her grandfather at his motel. Her grandfather lost his job after the lake began shrinking. Her poignant description of his recent life captures how vastly things have changed: “My grandfather’s motel, which was never empty of tourists in the past, now lies deserted and ruined. During the summer, my grandfather always fixes the windows broken by wind in the winter.”

The words “abandoned” and “deserted” feature often in Daryani’s project, referring to piers that lead onto the dried-up lake or dilapidated ships that today lie unused in the sand. But Daryani’s acknowledgement of this desolation is intertwined with memories of what the place used to be, of which there are still tangible remnants: “Three swan-shaped paddleboats still remain, a reminder of the time when the summer days were filled with children’s laughter and so many holidaymakers came to the inn that some of them had to sleep under the almond trees. … I can still remember those moments clearly, and hear the sound of the waves and the wind.” Daryani’s convincing invocation of these memories works as a plea to the viewer to contemplate how personal trajectories can be derailed by environmental crises.

Climate change is central to Daryani’s other work as well: she has explored the effect of water disputes with Afghanistan on Iran’s wetlands, as well as how the increasingly polluted Karun river impacts communities dependent on it. Daryani is compelled by how relationships between places and past events “shape human identity and provide memories that are a reservoir of pain and joy.” And her vivid memory of a childhood by the banks of Urmia explains why she chose to contemplate the lake’s destruction through a nostalgic, rather than a sociological, prism in “The Eyes of Earth”—which takes its title from a line in a Henry David Thoreau poem. “There is a Persian term which says: ‘What arises from the heart, of necessity, sits well with the heart,’” she said. “If, to the rest of the world, the drying of Lake Urmia is only the elimination of a blue spot on the maps of Iran and the earth, for me and the other people who have lived there, it is forgetting some part of my identity and memories.”