The small, consecutive orange images stored in narrow envelopes in the closet marked my Introduction to photography. The printed versions of our family photos kept in colorful albums always bored me.
Most of these images, which I later learned were called negatives, were photos my father took between 1977 and 2005. As a teenager, my father became an apprentice to his uncle, a photographer, to earn some income, and that’s how his photography journey began.
For me, these negatives possess a power that no positive or digital photo has ever matched. Sitting on the carpet, carefully pulling these miniature images out of their holders, trying to find a bright surface that would allow me to see these negatives felt like secretly peeking into the lives of people I mostly didn’t know. People who were no longer here, but I was sure had once been there, and now I had access to them.
For me, born after the 1979 revolution and grew up during the Iran-Iraq war, these photos symbolized a better time (which, of course, later also came into question). All because of the things I was told about certain types of freedoms for people, especially for women.
I brought our family archive with me to the US in 2021 when I decided to leave Iran. For someone who hasn’t seen her country for almost three years and is not planning to go back to stay out of prison- due to the content of my practice-, these negatives serve as a tangible homeland. For the past few years, I’ve been studying them. At first, my intention was just to scan and ensure they were permanently digitized. That they are preserved. I would sit for hours, staring at them on a monitor made me think.
Made me think about my father’s relationship with photography, with my mother, and with life. Interestingly enough, photography is the only shared interest between me and my father. For most of my life, I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with him, rooted in political and ideological differences. My father was part of a revolution that, from my perspective, was the main cause of oppression and the persistence of patriarchy in Iran.
Looking at these images, gave me a different understanding of the idealistic youth who naively supported the Islamic Revolution. His passion for justice and rebellion is not unlike my own. My father was a young man from a low-income background seeking a better life. He fought for the possibility of more opportunities in a society where only the royal class had access to such privileges.
Like us, the post-revolution generations, who have been trying to do the same for the same ideals.
This process helped me to forgive him for his involvement in the 1979 revolution.
His photos include pictures of his friends, his trips with them—which were common for boys and not girls— of his family, and a significant number of my teenage mother. My father had been infatuated with my mother since he was 13, and after much persistence, he finally gained her family's approval at age 19 to marry her. However, the photos he took of my mother during their secret rendezvous hold a different feeling for me. During the 1979 unrest, my father would attend protests during the day, and meet my mother in the evenings. I’ve been told they secretly met—because of the traditional views on relationships between men and women who weren’t married—in a park where I imagine my father, mesmerized by my mother’s beauty in the golden light, would place her on a bench or near a bush, then slowly back away to find the perfect frame, capturing his object of desire.
I, on the other hand, never thought I could use photography to explore anything personal, it was always about the collective issues of, to put it shortly, women,life,freedom. He preferred to photograph my mother, while, just two streets over, people were screaming Death to Shah.
From the time the 2009 Green Movement began in Iran while I was a photography student in college, to this day, I have felt an unflinching responsibility to be a voice that speaks about the issues that Iranian people, especially Iranian women, are enduring. Not only today or the last 45 years but for centuries.
I believe I still can’t speak of a concern that isn’t political.Simply because politics changed me, forced me into exile and changed my whole life.
In my father’s photos though, I found something that is both personal and political. It is the presence of life itself. Life for people who are suffering from 513,076.88% inflation- since 1979, with no human rights, women with minimum rights, but still continue to live with humor and a certain carefreeness. Perhaps it’s due to their practiced endurance of hardship when they create memes from their struggles instead of giving up.
This archive represents a history of small pleasures in the lives of ordinary Iranians. In the West, when Iran is mentioned, people often envision only pain and oppression. I want to counter this image. The desensitized gaze toward the Middle East needs to be altered. If people from regions like Iran are portrayed as individuals with faces and names, building empathy becomes possible.
This body of work would challenge, question, and explore absent narratives about Iran as a nation, as a place, as a history, to create a space to unlearn a singular truth. By reclaiming what is missing, I want to highlight leisure, pleasure, and joy that we experience as we suffer through injustices.
Historically, the leaders of the 1979 Islamic Revolution created a narrative that tied joy to Western imperialism and culture, perpetuating a false system of values in which any sign of joy or pleasure was frequently associated with corruption and unholiness. By reconstructing fragments of brief delights—whether it’s taking photos of a loved one or playing cards by the beach—found in my father's photos, I focus on building an understanding in which the Iranian people are not seen as "the other." I strive to confront Western perceptions, whether through news outlets that portray Iranians (and Middle Easterners in general) as antagonists or within the Western gaze in the art scene and market, where the suffering of the Iranian people is often commodified. This dynamic creates a tendency to praise works with tragic themes, that leads to a dysfunctional circle of representation and identity for an Iranian artist like me.
I want to break the cycle.