Interview with photographer Shadafarin Ghadirian

MS - We wanted to know a little about you. SG - I'm 25, I finished school eight years ago, and a year after that I started taking classes in photography at one of the azad universities [private universities], they had just established a department there, and we were the first sudents to take those classes. Noone knew what they would turn out like, it was something of a risk. TZ - Weren't there any other photography courses? SG - There were, but none were as well equipped as the azad universities, although by now, their equipment is falling apart too. What was difficult was working and studying at the same time. If you weren't the kid of a well-to-do family, you had to work fairly hard.

MS - Students in Iran have to work for their university education?

SG - Photography is particularly expensive to study, since you have to come up for your own equipment. For another thing, there's quite a difference between the time I was studying and what's happening now. University fees have been rising regularly, and there have been a number of students who haven't studied at the azadi because of the costs. Those who go there today are relatively well off.

I read somewhere that the azadi had proven true the slogan elm behtar az servat ["science over wealth"]. They're actually proving the opposite.

TZ - And then you were finishing university -

SG - My final project was on women's portraits during the Qajar period [late 18th to early 20th century]. I had spent a lot of time working at the city museum for photography, and I became interested in the history. I became familiar with the techniques of the Qajar period, and I've printed a number of the pictures unto paper. It's a period and a style that I've come to know well.

For the project, I had everything reconstructed, I had a friend who was a painter prepare the backdrop, I borrowed the dresses and made some myself, and so on. I also had the models reenact the poses that you see in the Qajar pictures - back then, photography was still very unusual and intimidating, and I tried to reconstruct the stance that the models would take, which was very different to that of contemporary models.

Until that time, portraits had been forbidden on religious grounds, even paintings. So the impact of photography, once it arrived in Iran, was enormous, it was something radically new - noone had ever seen a portrait before.

MS - I was wondering whether there was a hidden history of women's photography in Iran.

SG - Iran was the first country in the region to have taken up photography - it arrived here ten years after its invention - that's why we have thousands of pictures dating back to the Qajar period. But as for women, there was the problem of being mahram [closely related] or not, which would determine whether a man could photograph a certain woman, so as a consequence, women were photographed a lot less. There was a series of pictures of women taken by Nasser od din Shah [1848-96], who was a photographer himself. He took pictures of his haram, and of the all the women that were somehow related to his family.

Incidentally, my next project is a research project on an English woman photographer who travelled to Iran during the Qajar period. I'm planning to go to London to seek out her work in the archives, and eventually bring it here for an exhibition. It's a unique possiblity to see Iran through that perspective, through the eyes of a foreign woman of that period.

TZ - What happened after university?

SG - After university, I tried to complete and perfect the project I'd started, which in my opinion hasn't worked out. I stopped working on it at one point, and then didn't have the motivation to go back to it, so I decided to present it as it was.

It was eventually shown at the Golestan Gallery. I sold many of the pictures, which is rare here, people clearly prefer to buy paintings. I happened to sell more pictures than anyone before me - people thought my work had something different about it, that it was a new approach they hadn't seen before.

And I started work on different projects, projects on women, one of which is a series of unfocussed, black-and-white shots of a woman's figure. These pictures I can't show in Iran, for you can make out the shape of her body. I've also been working on collages, Qajar era pictures combined with contemporary imagery of violence and war.

MS - Why do you work on women?

SG - I've chosen to do studio work, mainly portraits, and I just work much better with women. Especially seeing as I invite them home to my studio, I'm more at ease that way.

TZ - Are women's issues dealt with in contemporary photography in Iran?

SG - Recently, they've been dealt with to quite an extent, though not in the sense of someone making portraits of women in a studio. To my knowledge, I'm still the only one. People are doing a lot of documentary work on women, out in the streets.

TZ - How come it's restricted to that ?

SG - Because women's issues are a delicate subject. Even though, in the course of the last year or so, things have gotten a lot better, and people have been working on women's issues far more than before.

I once participated in a competition called Ketab az didgah-e akasan (The Book from the Perspective of Photographers) - this was before my exhibition at Golestan. I had sent one of the pictures from my Qajar studies, the one with two women, fully veiled, holding a mirror reflecting a row of books, thinking that would work quite well. And I actually got a phone call from the jury saying I had won first prize. That was great news, the prize money was exceptionally high, and I was telling everyone about it, when two days later, they called me again to say ershad [the Ministry of Culture] had objected. So I was excluded from the competition. When I wanted to know on what grounds this was happening, they said, 'we suspect that those figures wearing chadors [veils] are actually men', or 'you're trying to say women are limited by the chador'. Those were the types of interpretations they came up with.

So from first prize I went to being eliminated from the whole competition as if I had never taken part. This was tough, I'd really worked hard on those portraits, and now they were saying, 'you may as well forget about them and put them in your bottom drawer and leave them there'.

The professor with whom I'd worked with on the project protested against the decision, and we insisted on sending another picture instead of the first one. I sent a very simple one with a woman sitting, holding a book in her hands, and they answered that the entire project was problematic, that none of the pictures from that collection were acceptable. But they couldn't give me a straight answer why. They just kept saying I was representing veiled women as limited and restrained.

The only one who eventually agreed to show my work was Ms. Golestan. You see, about a year and a half ago, the laws changed, and instead of having to ask permission from ershad, curators were declared responsible for their own choices regarding the works they showed. But this simply meant that if they went ahead with some project that ershad would suddenly proclaim unfit, the gallery would be closed down. This has been the situation ever since, and curators are scared of taking risks, especially regarding women's issues. And my work was so blatantly on women - women that are all dressed up on top of that.

TZ - But the audience itself reacted well.

SG - Very well.

TZ - There's a certain dry sense of irony in your Qajar study that's rare in contemporary Iranian art, as far as I can see.

SG - That's true. Then again, that particular work has had a number of different reactions and interpretations, from humoristic to political.

TZ - Were reactions very different when you showed your work in London, were people interested in other aspects, were they asking different questions?

SG - Reactions were just as good, but, yes, people asked completely different questions. For one thing, here in Iran, people know the historical context that I represent in my photographs, they know the implications of the style, the dress - whereas in England, they thought women in Iran still walked around like that. Or the very fact that I photographed women was in itself very interesting to them.

MS - What do you say about your work when you're pressed for an answer?

SG - I don't like talking about my work, I find that restricting, but I would say that it deals with the Iranian women of today, and with the fact that the limitations and laws that are imposed on them don't matter that much, that they still use modernism for themselves, pretty much as they like.

MS - Are there woman photographers around?

SG - Yes, there's quite a few, things have changed, especially during the last five years. When I first approached a newspaper for work, they flatly told me a woman photographer couldn't do the job. But nowadays, there's a ton of woman photographers working for newspapers.

Especially since, very recently, it has become easier to work on women - and it's so much easier for women photographers to do work on women - this has had a positive overall effect, it encourages women to join the profession.

Actually, much of the time, it's much easier for a female photographer to work in Iran than for a male one. Take, for example, the small villages with a very traditional, religious way of life. The villagers would be suspicious of a man going into their homes, interacting with the women and the kids, but I myself have taken pictures without having the slightest problem.

TZ - How are your relations with photographers from older generations? I've heard that among writers, for example, there are deep political tensions because someone who has witnessed the revolution and/or the war will have a completely different outlook to someone who hasn't.

SG - Well, one big difference is that although there are many men, there are hardly any woman photographers from the period before the revolution. I can think of perhaps two or three.

As for the differences in outlook, of course those experiences change you, my own childhood was very deeply marked by the war, and you can see the impact of those events on many artists. But despite these differences, I must say that the older photographers have been extremely helpful and supportive in every possible way. We would have had a much harder time without them.

TZ - How would you judge relations between foreign and local artists?

SG - For one thing, in some ways, photography is still relatively new in Iran. It really boomed for the first time in the course of the last seven or eight years, both in terms of commercial and non-commercial forms of photography. As a result, an enormous amount of things are still very new and interesting to the eye, and much is still completely undocumented. Whereas in Europe, people are jaded - if you've seen everything around you captured on film a thousand times over, obviously you'll have a different approach.

TZ - Do you plan to stay in Iran?

SG - Now that I've found what interests me in terms of my work, I have to develop it further. I'd like to keep working with women here in Iran. I've considered leaving, especially while I was in London, because I had the option of staying if I had wanted to, but I decided against it.

TZ - The food was that bad.

SG - Yes, the food was pretty bad.

I just wasn't interested in staying. The photographers there are so different. They've reached a different point in their development, they deal with different issues. I couldn't relate to their work, I found it alienating.

Documentation has a different role here. It seems to me as if the younger generation in Iran had a stronger sense of responsibility toward their work. If there's a public event, everyone rushes over to ensure that it gets documented. Or it's important for us to seek things out that are disappearing, to document them, like, for instance, traditional architecture in Tehran. Our problems are very different to theirs. And I'd say that, compared to those I saw in Europe, photographers here have a certain maturity, they all have issues that they take very seriously.

MS - Would you agree that, if European photographers are, say, more interested in issues of form, one of the most pressing issues in Iran is that of opening things up to the public. Not only in the political sphere - people's private lives are so sacrosanct in Iran, there's still so much to be done, so many issues haven't been touched upon in public, let alone on film.

SG - Exactly. Other matters, like those that are important to Europeans right now, might come up further along the line.

TZ - One question that I think is important when it comes to pictures of women with chadors or headscarves, is whether they emphasize the headdress more than the women, or whether they show that wearing a headscarf is not a matter of losing ones identity after all.

SG - Exactly. If, say, for my mother, who was suddenly obliged to wear a headscarf after the revolution, it was a matter of oppression, for me, it's something I've grown up with, and that has become very normal. It doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I wouldn't even be particularly happy if I could take it off again.

This really isn't our most pressing issue, and it's so interesting to me that all the foreigners seem to think it is.

MS - What would you define as the more urgent issues?

SG - Foreigners seem to think we're overcome with problems, but that's not what's happening. Women have started working on an equal footing to men.

You see, I don't necessarily mean Bad Jens, but there are now a number of institutions that only work with women, or only show women's work, who aren't really helping the women's cause, because they themselves separate men and women, and so they're unable to show that the two are actually equal. That's the way I see it.

When it comes to women's everday difficulties, you have to distinguish between single women and married women, whose problems are far greater. I would say that I myself run into problems as a photographer, every time I want to travel, for example. They won't give hotel rooms to single women, and I don't drive around alone, for if you run into difficulties along the way, they're sure to bother you in some way or another. But it's getting better by the day.

MS - How do you relate to the younger generation of photographers?

SG - Between our generation and those that are roughly twenty years of age today, there's already an enormous difference. Both generations grew up in very specific contexts. The girls that were born after the revolution now enjoy a number of freedoms that I didn't have when I was an adolescent. They're far more audacious than we ever were.

But they've suffered from this in a way. We in our generation knew we were restricted, we knew our limits, and we tried to make the best of them. I rarely went out with my boyfriend, for example, for we were sure to get hassled. But those that came after us are in a much more confusing situation. For instance, they're very different to foreign kids, and yet they're constantly looking to them. They've become something really bizarre.

MS - Are you worried things will go back to the way they were before?

SG - No, that's impossible.

Shadafarin Ghadirian can be reached by email at shadi@peyam.net

transl.: TZ

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