Female Photographers Depict Their Iran
By Ryan • Dec 6th, 2007 • Category: News for Creatives (archives), PhotographyBy Siobhan Dowling for Der Speigel:
“A woman in a headscarf photographs herself in a mirror, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini cover the wall behind her and her lens also captures three laughing bare-chested men in the corner of a cramped room. The photograph by Mehraneh Atashi of a men’s sports center in Tehran, is just one of 70 striking photographs by young Iranian women on display in Berlin’s Cicero Gallery.
Entitled “Made in Tehran” the show exhibits the work of six young Iranians, all born between 1974 and 1981, who have all studied photography in Tehran. While the woman have very different artistic visions, the photographs are all marked by the theme of identity, of being young and female in today’s Iran and of how that generation views the past. While some of the photographs capture everyday scenes others use collage and other methods to create individual and distinctive photographic styles.
Newsha Tavakolian is a photojournalist who has been working for the Iranian press since she was 16, and who won the National Geographic Society photo award in 2006 for her photo essay entitled “Iran: Women in the Axis of Evil.” She has chosen to depict young Iranians in their everyday life: Women in headscarves sit smoking in a café, or demonstrate for peace; young men celebrate with their friends around a campfire. Two young women in headscarves walk under a billboard of a suave young man wearing shades and sitting in a convertible.
Mehraneh Atashi’s series of photographs called Zourkahneh, or “power house,” show young sweaty men in a sports center. The young photographer managed to get into this exclusive male world and the result is a highly unusual series of images. They show the headscarved woman with a camera in the mirror’s reflection, controlling the scene and its protaganists. It turns traditional views of gender relations in the Islamic republic on their head.”
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