Newsha Tavakolian: Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album

Newsha Tavakolian, Girls smoking, 2015 © Newsha Tavakolian - Fondation Carmignac
Girls smoking, 2015 © Newsha Tavakolian – Fondation Carmignac

Tavakolian is waiting for us in the garden of a grand hotel in Paris. The Carmignac Foundation, with whom she has had such a publicly complex relationship, have organised for a group of London journalists to get an early Eurostar to the French capital. She wears a long-sleeve, pin-stripe shirt and a long black shirt, a leather jacket over the top. Her hair, without veil, drops over her shoulders. Over duck breast and wine, she smilingly – nervously – fields questions from two women sat either side of her, both experienced arts journalists keen to learn of her life. She seems a little overwhelmed by it all; the Parisian opulence, the attention, the slight need to perform. Yet, before we eat, she comments to the table as a whole, how the men and women have been separated; men on one side, women on the other. Her husband, the Dutch-born New York Times correspondent Thomas Erdbrink cracks a joke, and she laughs.

Later that afternoon, we are driven to Le Chapelle des Beaux Arts, a beautiful, vast architectural complex opposite the Louvre in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, run by France’s Ministry of Culture and Communication.

In a Church-like gallery, the walls of which are covered in Renaissance-era art, Tavakolian has hung her series; videos and stills and text combine to tell the stories and imbue the feelings of her so-called burnt generation. She accepts pictures, signs books, and patiently fields questions in French and English from wandering passersby.

But do not underestimate her steeliness. Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album is politically charged; a defiant message to those that define her country, from both the outside and in. It’s a rebuke to the framings and perceptions, the ignorance and impressionism, that seek to depict Iran as a lair of extremists. It’s a statement of artistic integrity, and an affirmation of a full and rich life, in a country still defined in so many ways by its theocratic intolerance, its relentless oppression of women, its fervent control over individualism.

© Newsha Tavakolian – Fondation Carmignac

“For me, Iran is the country where I was born,” she says. “I went to school here, started my career and never left. As a photographer, I have always struggled with how to perceive my society, with all its complexities and misunderstandings. I decided to continue the photo albums of my generation.”

Tavakolian shows us men smiling with their daughters on their birthday, or laughing together in vibrant street scenes; of children smiling at street parties, or playing together, in long head-dresses, at school; of women, covered, with Chanel handbags and Marlborough lights, applying make-up, appraising their new nose, dancing together in exercise classes or riding a bike along the beach at sunrise. It shows Tehran for what it is: a rich, complex and colourful capital city.

Tom Seymour

Tom Seymour is an Associate Editor at The Art Newspaper and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. His words have been published in The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper* and The Telegraph. He has won Writer of the Year and Specialist Writer of the year on three separate occassions at the PPA Awards for his work with The Royal Photographic Society.