The proud figures in Maryam Rahmanian’s “Fashion Influencers” (2018) are female leaders of fashion influence on the social network Instagram, for which Iran is the seventh largest market. Pictured inside their homes in Tehran, these elegant young women are framed by the sharp lines and bright palettes of designer clothes and accessories, preciously arranged on wood paneled dressers or marble floors.
© Sina Shiri, Rasht, 1991
Untitled from the No man’s land series, 2017
Analog photography, Anti-Reflective Diasec print, 50x60cm, Edition of 7+2AP
Exhibited: IRAN PHOTO, Paris, 2018
Sina Shiri’s “No Man’s Land” (2017) offers an intimate look at the faces that trace the highways between distant cities. As a photographer, he studies each visage, seeking the lines of its story. For Shiri, “it is the people that best express the nature of a road, and what it connects.”
© Negar Yaghmaian, Tehran, 1984
Untitled from the One day, I saw the sun set 44 times series, 2016
Diasec print, 50x75 cm, Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Exhibited: IRAN PHOTO (inside & outside), Paris, 2019
The lyric, black and white images of Negar Yaghmaian’s “One day, I saw the sun set 44 times” (2016) evoke the pain of separation, the sadness of a lover’s breakup. “Through this life experience that most everyone has lived,” Yaghmaian says, “I took refuge in photography, a therapy to soothe the void.”
The work of these young, contemporary photographers offers a nuanced vision of Iran, one that reveals the complex changes that the country has experienced over the last four decades, changes that have been, from time to time, in opposition with traditional religious values.
© Kaveh Kazemi
Gas Mask Drill in Iran fromthe Revolutionaries the first decade,
Tehran mosqe, 11thMay 1988, Analog photography, Dimensions variable
A group of women Basiji (mobilized volunteer forces) in a Tehran Mosque, learning to use gas masks in case of a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Bearing witness to these changes, we are pleased to show a selection of photographs from BADGUIR Honored artist Kaveh Kazemi’s “Revolutionneries the first decade,” a series realized between late 1978 and 1989. Chronicling this tumultuous decade in Iranian contemporary history, Kazemi’s work considers the recurring imagery of Iranian society that underwent a total transformation with the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the loss of human life and grief that war imposed as a testimony to the devastating realities of war Iran and Iraq between 1980 and 1988. The images shown here are part of a substantial archive of black and white photographs that tell the tale of a very difficult time in the history of the region.
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