© Hannah Darabi
“This is an ambitious, multilayered project,” says Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée and Jury President of the Lausanne museum’s biennial prize for a mid-career photographer, commenting on the latest recipient, Hannah Darabi’s Why Don’t You Dance?.
The work collages together photographs, archive materials and pop culture ephemera to explore how dance functions as both a form of resistance and a cultural barometer in Iranian society, examining the subject through the lens of three key figures. The Paris-based “artist-researcher”, born and raised in Tehran, will use the Prix Elysée’s very substantial purse – which at 80,000 CHF, or nearly £75,000, is the world’s third biggest photography award – to complete the project over the next 12 months. She will present a preview of the work-in-progress at Paris Photo in November, and then Why Don’t You Dance? will be published as a book and exhibited at Photo Elysée in June 2026.
“We really believe in her future,” Herschdorfer tells British Journal of Photography. “She is tapping into a topic that is very relevant – just look at what is happening out in the world. And we need women’s voices in that. It’s always very difficult for artists to have the time, or the finances, to develop [a major work], and I really believe in her ability to generate a new kind of visual story.” This is the Prix Elysée’s reason for being, says Herschdorfer, who adds that such a substantial award would not be possible without luxury watchmaker, Parmigiani Fleurier, and its hands-off trust and support.
We caught up with Darabi in late June, just 36 hours after the US launched a series of missile strikes on Iran.
“At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance. “
– Hannah Darabi
BJP: Congratulations on winning the Prix Elysée. But it’s also a difficult moment, because we are speaking not long after the US attacked your home country, and Iran is currently at war with Israel. Has your family been affected?
Hannah Darabi: My family is there, and we are very worried, because they’re in Tehran and today one of the streets near to their house was attacked. We are living in a very uncertain moment.
BJP: Do you go back to Iran often?
HD: I haven’t been back since 2019. My parents are very old, and I felt it would be a risk if I went back during Covid. Afterwards, there was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and everything was unstable again. Also, the government started making threats towards artists and activists in a kind of random manner. It didn’t matter if you were political or not, which I think was a strategy – to alarm people, [to scare them into thinking] that if you do something, you will be caught.
BJP: What memories do you have of growing up in Iran?
HD: When I was born [in 1981], it was the time of the Iran-Iraq War… Sometimes, life was horrible. We would get a red siren to go to the bunkers, and a white siren to come out. But in between we lived life. There were still parties and get-togethers, and those were the moments that kept us sane and alive. There were shortages of many things, and we had [rationing]. But, at the same time, we had dinners, and there was music, and there were people dancing. And then, after the war, dancing became really important.
BJP: That relates to your project, Soleil of Persian Square, and its connection to popular music within the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles.
HD: Some of the people were like superstars in Iran, where they had all the equipment, studios, poets – everything to make ‘proper’ music. And then when they went to LA, they lost everything. So, the music changed because of that, but also because, when they emigrated to the States in 1979 after the [revolutionary] war, they would do all this sad, nostalgic music, and they realised that people were sick of it, and they wanted to dance.
This specific music emerged; a mixture of ‘good’ pop music, and the popular cabaret-like music that was [previously] considered really bad and not at all interesting. In Los Angeles they mixed it up. They created this fantastic new genre, which developed in relation to their situation, and which took in other influences, such as Latin music and music from Arab countries.
Then they sent that music to us [back in Iran]. When I was growing up, I was a shy kid, so my parents put me in a dance class. We would do Iranian popular dance, but there were also all these new tunes that we received, as well as new choreography. And one of the choreographers from these times in LA was Mohammad Khordadian, who is one of the three figures that I was inspired by [and whose work I investigate] in Why Don’t You Dance?.
BJP: I read that you felt that it took moving away from Iran to reflect critically on your homeland. How did that manifest?
HD: It took nine years to make peace with myself as someone who has this geographical distance from home, but who still has the need to discuss it. I wasn’t really feeling at home in Paris [where she initially went to study]. So I decided to go back and make peace with Tehran [through my work], even though I thought it would be impossible; it’s too chaotic, there are too many people and too many buildings. But then somehow I saw the beauty and how photogenic this ugly city could be.
And then came Enghelab Street, a Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983 [shown in Paris in 2019 at Le Bal, who co-published a book with Spector], which I wouldn’t have talked about if I was in Iran, because the Iranian government identifies itself as being in a constant revolutionary mode. You get all these ideas and propaganda around the revolution, especially in the form of everyday images. But I really wanted to keep aside my own feelings. I didn’t want to make a statement with my work.
And it was the same with popular music. I hated it [when I lived in Iran]. For me, it was too nice. At the time, Iranian punk didn’t exist, but [something like it was] necessary to express our anger… Then, when I left, I had other tools, and I understood the value of this music. I had been looking at it from a very snobbish, intellectual viewpoint.
BJP: How and when did your work evolve to this form of expanded photography, encompassing your research, and including more collage.
HD: The collage form came from the research into archives and from the materials I found, putting them in conversation with my own photographs, or trying to add some other possible readings, activating the materials. So there is a clear photographic approach, and then there are these archival materials that are treated the same way, and then maybe another visual element, all working in dialogue beside each other.
There isn’t a lot of cutting and gluing going on. Everything is very clean. There are forms of books and pictures, but instead of putting them separately on the page, they’re all together. It comes from my practice in exhibition spaces, using one image as a wallpaper and putting the other on top of it to make a more intimate connection.
BJP: What do these materials look like?
HD: One chapter of the project is based on a book by a dancer called Mahvash, who made a fictional autobiography called The Secrets of Sexual Fulfillment. Everything comes together around the ideas in the book. It starts by mostly giving advice on sexual education to boys and girls of the time. We don’t know if she’s an expert, or if she’s had lots of experiences, and you see this change in Iranian society to a heteronormative mode.
Then at the end, she starts to unfold her experiences. And it’s subversive. That’s also why I love this book, because it contradicts itself at the end. So, everything we see [in this chapter of Why Don’t You Dance?] is in relation to things that are discussed in the book. It can be questions about polygamy, or questions on how women are seen in popular culture. It’s exploring all these popular ideas: the ones that persist, and the ones that change. It also reflects on different moments of the Iranian women’s movement.
BJP: Tell me about how your last work, Soleil of Persian Square, fed into this latest project.
HD: It’s always like that – the next project comes out of an old project, something that I had noticed but which needed more space and concentration. And when I was doing Soleil of Persian Square, I was looking at all these clips, and dance was so present in them.
At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance. Popular music and popular dance had never been considered political beforehand. My generation would disobey what’s supposed to be conventional behaviour, but we didn’t know that what we were doing wasn’t just a foolish reaction. The generation after us completely changed how we look at resistance.
I thought it was fantastic how they invested [resistance into] this art form, [creating] a solution for a protest that was unthinkable. Protest, getting together, was not possible anymore. There was no possibility of organising, of writing or making posters. So, it was very interesting to me that this specific form of art suddenly became very useful for the purpose [of resistance].
BJP: The prize provides you with the support to focus on completing your latest project, Why Don’t You Dance?, for which you are working on three chapters based around three key figures. You have completed much of the work on the first chapter, based around Mahvash. And you have already mentioned Mohammad Khordadian, the dancer and choreographer based in LA, who is the third chapter. What can you tell me about the second chapter and who it is based upon?
HD: Jamileh was very active as a cabaret dancer in the 1960s and 70s. She represents this moment of shift. Cabaret dancers were seen as deviant… [Yet] she appeared in most of the popular films of her era, always playing this role of the belly dancer. There were all these social conflicts around the figure of the cabaret dancer, but what I really liked is that she represents to me a kind of feminism that is not from the middle class. She [represents] this kind of popular feminism.
In one film she played the role of a good woman, hiding her real identity to marry a very upper class guy. At some point, she’s sick of it, and she dresses really provocatively. She is in this beautiful house, she is drunk, and she says to the musicians, ‘Hey, play me a tune!’ Then she comes down the staircase doing this provocative dance, and all the bourgeois people are shocked. She was a feminist, but not like an activist. It just comes out in her daily behaviour.
BJP: You will focus on the jâheli dance, of which she was a pioneer.
HD: The dance reflected and also depicted this group of men in a particular neighbourhood [of Tehran]. They had very specific clothing, and a particular style of talking and walking. They were like protectors of the neighbourhood, and protectors of the weak, but also they would get involved in petty crimes, and were sometimes used by the government to [break up] protests.
These people were jâhel. It was a subculture, very present in popular films. They wore fedoras, white shirts, black costumes and scarves, but they never put their coats on properly, just on their shoulders. And they did the jâheli dance. But Jamileh made it a dance for women.
This was a very masculine world, in which women were considered weak specimens. And she got that and [met it] with humour. That’s what I really like about her behaviour…. She just did it for fun, and she laughed because she just loved that dance. But it became a political statement. She incorporated something that was absolutely masculine and took it to another dimension.