\nThames & Hudson<\/a> 2023
\nISBN 9780500027158<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Malu Halasa<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
Since the Islamic Revolution, photography by women has been a barometer of social change in Iran. Shiva Khademi\u2019s portraits of \u201cThe Smarties\u201d\u2014 Gen Z women who dyed their hair and refused to wear the hijab \u2014 were taken two years before the death of Jina Mahsa Amini sparked nationwide protests. The forthright expressions of the young women staring into Khademi\u2019s camera are unnerving; they could have been Goths or hardasses anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n
While the nationwide protests were still ongoing earlier this year, the Tehran magazine Nadastan<\/a> published a special women\u2019s issue, with articles about \u201cthe smallest woman in the world,\u201d pioneering Persian early educationalist Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi (1859\u20131921), and hair in its many manifestations: as wigs (India is the largest exporter of hair) and in literature and history, from the white hair of Zal in Ferdowsi\u2019s Shahnameh<\/em> to Rapunzel’s shorn locks.<\/p>\n \"No one's born with this kind of hair, so I dye mine.\" Shiva, b. 1998, Tehran. Portraiture by Shiva Khademi in \"The Smarties\" series, courtesy of \"Women Life Freedom: Voices and Arts from the Women's Protest in Iran\" (Saqi Books).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> \"With colors I can find myself or in other words, I invent myself.\" Aida, b. 1996, Tehran (Shiva Khademi).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> \"It's about the character that I create with each color. I'm made out of colors.\" Azin, b. 1999, Tehran (Shiva Khademi).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> The cover of Nadastan featured the rear view of a woman\u2019s full head of curly, dark hair, an image taken by the magazine\u2019s photography editor Mehri Rahminzadeh, who once put pregnancy tests on the magazine\u2019s cover. Nadastan\u2019s \u201chair\u201d issue was published at a time when the Islamic Republic, bruised by international condemnation of its violence against Woman Life Freedom demonstrators, was in retreat. The magazine\u2019s issue was not commented on or chastised in public, although an Iranian woman journalist who had left the country around that time had suggested to me that another red check had been placed by somebody\u2019s name and trouble from the government begins when there is a proliferation of red checks.<\/p>\n Today, the harassment and arrest of unveiled women is once again on the rise, more recently with the death of 16-year-old schoolgirl Armita Geravand<\/a>, last seen on Tehran Metro CCTV being carried out of the train by her friends after a violent encounter with the Morality Police. (Geravand died on October 28 in a military hospital). Today, Nadastan hair cover might not be so easily ignored. Photography in Iran remains a critical art form, despite government efforts to curtail it. Magnum photographer Newsha Tavakolian<\/a> comes from a generation of photojournalists who had been targeted by the authorities for covering the 2009 Green Movement mass protests. She has spoken about the last image she took as a photojournalist in her country. A male demonstrator at a Green Movement rally turned around, noticed her camera pointing in his direction and covered his face with his hand; he wanted to avoid possible identification and arrest by the authorities. This was before the widespread surveillance cameras and facial recognition that the country relies on today, and photographers and ordinary people were often harassed by the security services to provide the names of individuals or the photographers taking pictures of them, who had been protesting on the streets. Understandably Tavakolian, and other news and documentary photographers and filmmakers beat a retreat from public spaces into the privacy of the artist\u2019s studio.<\/p>\n A world-weary woman in a hijab wearing red boxing gloves stares out from the cover of the large format picture book, Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers<\/em>. The boxer, from Tavakolian\u2019s Listen, <\/em>2010 series, was among work by 23 photographers across three generations included in this lavish collection edited by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, the curator of the Silk Road, Tehran\u2019s first photography gallery.<\/p>\n Listen<\/em> is Tavakolian\u2019s response to Iran\u2019s religious bans which prevent women from singing solo in public or recording their own CDs. The female boxer on the book\u2019s cover is just one of several faux CD covers Tavakolian created for her art series, which also includes portraits of Iranian divas such as the \u201cVoice of Kurdistan\u201d Sahar Lotfi<\/a> who insists on singing despite the religious strictures against female voices.<\/p>\n Contemporary photography came of age during the 1979 Islamic revolution. During a nationwide news blackout, pictures of the bloody battles taking place on the streets were taped to Tehran\u2019s city walls for all to see. Opening Breathing Space<\/em> are the black and white photographs from Hengameh Golestan\u2019s \u201cWitness\u201d series showing the mass women\u2019s protests against compulsory wearing of the hijab that took place weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. Forty-three years later, during the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations, photographs from Witness<\/em> appeared on the city\u2019s walls, in impromptu exhibitions.<\/p>\n Understandably, the women in Golestan\u2019s images are angry. One in particular can be seen lecturing a mullah. The women of Golestan\u2019s generation had fought in a difficult, often violent revolution. Their reward was the wholesale loss of their rights, from employment to divorce after the Islamic Republic came to power. Even female photographers were targeted in the state\u2019s pushback to return women into the home.<\/p>\n Golestan, considered the doyenne of Iranian women\u2019s photography, had planned to cover the Iran\u2013Iraq (1980\u201388). Her husband Kaveh Golestan (1950\u20132003), the iconic Iranian photographer and cameraman, was already on the frontline. When she sought official permission to cover the war from Ershad, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, her request was denied. A ministry official told her that her time would be better spent at home, making pickles and jam for men at the front.<\/p>\n To this day, the war casts a long shadow over the young and old women photographers, in Breathing Space<\/em>. Rana Javadi also photographed the 1979 Revolution. With Golestan, she too had sought a permit from Ershad to cover the Iran\u2013Iraq war and was refused, because of gender.<\/p>\n From her studio she created the series Never\u2013Ending Chaos<\/em>, from her own photos of from historic tiles from a religious site in Kermanshah (the Kurdish city which saw heavy action in the war) and images of the actual war, including those by Javadi\u2019s husband, the well-known photographer and teacher Bahman Jalali.<\/p>\n Ghazaleh Rezaei in her series The Martyrs<\/em>, 2021, also uses the images from a male family member \u2014 in her case her uncle \u2014 who covered the war when Rezaei was still in diapers. She obscures the faces of the martyrs or soldiers in her uncle\u2019s pictures with flash to suggest the lingering, destructive and obscuring \u201choliness\u201d of martyrdom.<\/p>\n Maryam Takhtkeshian in No Solider Has Returned from War<\/em>, 2020, uses camera film past its expiry date and a camera popular with soldiers during World War II. Her photographs of modern day soldiers are eerie, shadowy images, which allude to the disappearance of Takhtkeshian\u2019s uncle during the Iran\u2013Iraq War and the return of his body to their family some eleven years later.<\/p>\n Three years after its invention of photography in Paris, two daguerreotype cameras arrived in the court of Mohammad Shah Qajar. The Crown Prince, Naser al-Din Shah, who had been given an early camera by Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas, became an avid amateur photographer and went on to document court life, including the 84 wives and 100 concubines in his harem. These images remained private, for his own personal use. In early renditions of Iranian family portraits, the women were missing. However by the turn of the 20th century, studio photography became popular, and ordinary Iranians, men, women and children, went to photographic studios, often run by Armenians, to dress up or act out in individual or group photographs.<\/p>\n Photo historian Parisa Damandan<\/a> saved glass-negative archives from the photographic studios in Bam in the aftermath of the 2003 earthquake. Her seminal study, Studio Photography from Isfahan: Faces in Transition 1920\u20131950<\/em>, charts the evolution in Iran from a rural country of clans to the rise of the \u201ckingly citizen\u201d with an emphasis on civic pursuits (i.e. teachers associations or other professional organizations, their members notably in Western dress). Damandan\u2019s study also includes studio photographs taken of blond, blue-eyed Polish Jews sent to Iran once diplomatic relations between Russia and Germany broke down during World War II.<\/p>\n One of the best-known photo series in Breathing Space <\/em>is a pastiche of studio photography. In Qajar<\/em>, 1998, artist Shadi Ghadirian dressed her friends and family in Qajar period dress but added a twist. Each subject holds an emblem of modernity, one a newspaper, another a beatbox. In her series Like Every Day<\/em>, 2000\u20132001, also included in Breathing Space,<\/em> a figure photographed in a flowered or patterned chador from the waist up has instead of a face, a household implement: a rubber glove, iron, grater or plate etc.<\/p>\n Erasure is a theme in Breathing Space<\/em>. In The Enigmatic Fringe of Existence<\/em>, 2017\u20132018, by Nazli Abbaspour, constructs photomontages: family photographs overlaid with textile patterns, a butterfly or decrepit, old houses. These create a space where, as Silk Road\u2019s Etehadieh writes, \u201cFiction and phantoms of the past are engaged in a dialogue with the present day, like symbols of a blurred identity, clouded by the ongoing series of events that have rocked Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n Interestingly, many family albums, which include pre 1979 images of male and female members in states of dress considered \u201cimmodest\u201d by the current government, can\u2019t be shown or exhibited in public. Photographer Sahar Mokhtari cuts out certain figures in family snapshots in Oblivion Principle<\/em>, 2016, or places family groupings in odd settings, tucked away on a windowsill or on a bookshelf for The Others<\/em>, 2020.<\/p>\n A more violent removal occurs in Ghazaleh Hedayat\u2019s Repetition<\/em>, 2019 self-portraits. Scratched or whited out, her photos almost seem to border on self-harm. While in the images of Hidden<\/em>, 2018, by Atoosa Alebouyeh, a high fashion concept is at play. Yet the photographer\u2019s self-portraits always looking away from the camera, in a white minimalist rooms or spaces, seem intrinsically mournful.<\/p>\n A photographer\u2019s use of a highly decorative, repetitive, colorful backdrop brings out the subjects\u2019 individuality, as in Updating a Family Album<\/em> by Malekah Nayiny. By placing vintage advertising faces from the 1960s and 1970s in unexpected places such as old doors and battered walls for her series Past Residue<\/em>, 2009, Nayiny breathes new vitality into a lost time.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Iran is not considered a tourist destination, which makes Hoda Afshar’s photographs for Speak the Wind<\/em>, 2015\u20132020, taken on islands of the Strait of Hormuz, on the country\u2019s southern coast, so intriguing. These mysterious and strange images have been influenced by both the landscape\u2019s natural formations and the legends brought by the slaves trafficked from southeastern Africa.<\/p>\n The sepia-colored A Travelogue to the Iranian Plateau<\/em> by Pargol E. Naloo shows yet another devastated landscape, as Iran\u2019s rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers fall victim to climate change and dry up. Naloo’s images in many ways capture a poetic environmental decline that are reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher\u2019s stark industrial landscapes.<\/p>\n One gets similar feelings of cruel, indifferent environments but this time it\u2019s entirely manmade, on the stark highways beneath Hoda Amin\u2019s window for her photographs, No Man\u2019s Land<\/em>, 2013\u20132016. In them, lone figures \u2014 their backs to the camera \u2014 walk off into a dystopian future.<\/p>\n Gritty realism is the real strength of the women\u2019s photography in Breathing Space<\/em>, and it is realism that worries the regime the most.<\/p>\n In 2012, Tahmineh Monzavi<\/a> spent a month in solitary confinement in Evin Prison for her photographs of recovering female addicts in South Tehran, and Breathing Space<\/em> includes her photographs of the trans woman addict, Tina. This is not how Iranian women should be portrayed, Monzavi\u2019s jailers had told her, despite the country\u2019s clerical support for transexuality, as opposed to homosexuality, still considered a capital offense in Iran.<\/p>\n So what is the acceptable image of Iranian women? According to art photographer Amak Mahmoodian<\/a> (not included in Breathing Space<\/em>),\u00a0 it is \u201c\u2026 plain faces under hairless scarves \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Mahmoodian is known for producing her own photobooks. Shenasnameh<\/em> (birth certificate, in Persian) studied and reacted to women’s head shots required for government-issued identity documents over a period of years. Another of her books, Zanjir<\/em><\/a>, includes an imaginary conversation between the photographer and Qajar princess and diarist Taj Saltaneh (1883\u20131936) who appeared dressed as a man in photographic archives of Golestan Palace (where Naser al-Din Shah photographed his wives and concubines).<\/p>\n Powerful imagery and subject matter by Iranian women photographers resist religious laws and narrow conventions regarding gender and sexuality in their country.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like the anthology I edited, Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women\u2019s Protests in Iran<\/em><\/a>, another anthology Iranian Women Speak: Voices of Transformation<\/em>, in English and Persian, edited by Bridget Reaume for the International Human Rights Arts Festival (IHRAF), was published in response to the demonstrations after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini.<\/p>\n Iranian Women Speak<\/em> includes prison memoirs and critical short essays by anonymous voices, alongside poetry by Iranian-Ghanaian poet Caroline Reddy<\/a>.<\/p>\n One artist featured in both the IHRAF and Woman Life Freedom<\/em> anthologies is Mansooreh Baghgaraei. Iranian Women Speak<\/em> included Baghgaraei\u2019s flowers embroidered with women\u2019s hair, a piece entitled \u201cThe Liberated Hairs.\u201d<\/p>\n In her artist\u2019s statement in Iranian Women Speak<\/em> Baghgaraei writes, \u201cI asked women to donate cuttings of their hair. Each one\u2019s hair creates a work of powerful feminine art. A woman\u2019s hair is transformed into a medium to speak about all women, freedom and equality.\u201d<\/p>\n For Woman Life Freedom<\/em>, the artist gave us an embroidery showing the naked back of a woman protestor. It is punctured by red holes, to represent the wounds from a pellet gun the regime used against the demonstrators.<\/p>\n At the City Lights event for Woman Life Freedom, <\/em>the translator and novelist Salar Abdoh<\/a> spoke about differences between the opinions of Iranian women inside the country versus those in the diaspora, and how it would be a misreading of the Woman Life Freedom movement to assume that all women feel the same way.<\/p>\n One book that celebrates female achievement at home and in diaspora is 50 Inspiring Iranian Women,<\/em> written and illustrated by Roshi Rouzbehani, who has worked for The New Yorker and The Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n \"50 Inspiring Iranian Women\" from author-illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani (all images courtesy of the artist).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>![\"\"No](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1-No-ones-born-with-this-kind-of-hair-color-so-I-dye-mine.-Shiva-b.-1998-Tehran.-Portraiture-by-Shiva-Khademi-The-Smarties-2019-appears-courtesy-of-WLF.jpg\")
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