Yousefi’s practice can therefore be understood as a form of archaeology of the possible. He is not simply looking for what the photographs of the revolution show, but for what they might have shown and what, for a variety of reasons, remained at their margins. The face extracted from the crowd is a fragment of an unrealised future, or at least of a future that was never represented. We do not know who this person was, what their political position might have been, or what happened to their life after that day. Their anonymity is not a defect of the image, but the condition that allows the face to remain open. It cannot easily be reduced to a biography, an identity, or a completed narrative. It remains suspended in time, and it is precisely this suspension that makes it contemporary. Here Yousefi’s work resonates with what Mark Fisher, writing about hauntology, described as the persistence of “lost futures”: not simply things that have disappeared, but possibilities that once appeared to be open and that can now be perceived only as absences.³

This spectral dimension becomes particularly significant in relation to a revolutionary event. A revolution belongs, by definition, to a regime of openness: it promises a transformation of the present and, above all, produces an imagination of the future. But history, when it arrives afterwards, tends to transform this openness into a sequence of necessities. We know what happened and therefore tend to read the earlier images through what we already know. This is one of the most insidious forms of anachronism: the future is projected backwards as though it had already been contained within the past. “Eyes Dazzle” resists precisely this closure. The eyes of the demonstrators are not used to tell us what the revolution would become; instead, they seem momentarily to restore the uncertainty of what it had not yet become. In this sense, the book does not simply work upon the memory of the revolution, but upon the loss of its indeterminacy.

Yousefi’s statement that “their gaze has been waiting for my eyes for decades”⁴ acquires a particularly intense meaning here. There is no need to believe literally that those eyes had been waiting for the artist. Their waiting is produced by photography itself, by its capacity to suspend an instant and deliver it into a future that the photographed subject could not know. The gaze appears to be directed towards us because, retrospectively, we occupy that future. We are precisely what those people could not see: the future of the photograph. The encounter between Yousefi and his subjects is therefore less an encounter between two individuals than a temporal short circuit. The photographer of 1979 looks at the crowd; someone within the crowd looks back at the photographer; Yousefi looks at that photograph today; finally, we look at the result of this second exposure. Photography becomes a chain of gazes in which no observer ultimately possesses complete control over the image.

This is where the question of the gaze becomes more complex than a simple reversal between photographer and photographed subject. The subject who looks towards the lens appears to interrupt the asymmetrical relationship characteristic of documentary photography: they are no longer merely the person being seen, but the person who appears to see. Yet it would be too easy to transform this gesture into a straightforward restitution of power. We do not know what those eyes were looking for, nor why they turned towards the camera. We do not know whether the demonstrators were aware that they were being photographed, whether they were looking at the photographer, or at something beyond him. Photography preserves the act of looking, not its intention. It is precisely this distinction that prevents the work from becoming a retrospective psychology of its subjects. When Yousefi imagines that these faces may have desired to be recorded in history, he is proposing a poetic possibility, not a documentary truth. The strength of the image lies in the fact that we cannot verify that desire.

This impossibility of verification is anything but a limitation. It is what keeps the image open. Susan Sontag observed that photography produces a particular form of knowledge, apparently concrete but always separated from the experience it claims to document: “Photographs furnish evidence.”⁵ Yet photographic evidence is never identical to understanding. A photograph can demonstrate that someone was there without telling us who they were, what they thought, or what meaning they attributed to what was happening. “Eyes Dazzle” works precisely within this friction between evidence and knowledge. The more closely we look at these faces, the more visible they become; yet their increased visibility does not necessarily increase our knowledge of them. On the contrary, it can make us more conscious of the distance separating us from what we will never be able to know.

This is why Yousefi’s practice belongs to a conception of photography as a critical practice of the archive. The artist does not regard the archive as a place where history has already been deposited and merely needs to be retrieved; he treats it as a field of forces in which every new selection produces a different configuration of the past. His work therefore participates in a broader transformation of contemporary photographic practice, in which the photographer can simultaneously assume the roles of researcher, editor, archivist, and author. The photographic act no longer necessarily coincides with the moment when the shutter opens. It may begin much earlier, in the search for images, and continue long afterwards, through their selection, recomposition, and renewed circulation. To photograph becomes, in this sense, a form of reading.