Newsha Tavakolian: Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album

That night, a student dormitory was raided by riot police. A student was killed, and others were forced to jump from the balcony. The raid sparked six days of violent demonstrations and rioting throughout the country. Riot police, militia and vigilantes fought on the streets, and at least three more people were killed, as well as more than 200 injuries. After the protests were quashed, more than 70 students disappeared. The “whereabouts and condition” of some, Human Rights Watch claims, remain unknown.

While Western photographers largely tried to capture the warfare within safe distance of the city’s safe zones, Tavakolian “spent a week scaling trees and perching above with a zoom lens”, taking some of the defining images of one of the first genuine uprisings against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime.

Writing in Time, the American-Iranian journalist (and Tavakolian’s friend) Azadeh Moaveni said: “She was disarmingly young in those days, girlish and funny in a way that made you forget she had already become one of the most intrepid and influential photojournalists in the country, and of her generation.”

Taxi driver, 2015 © Newsha Tavakolian – Fondation Carmignac

She is not a known name outside of photography circles. Indeed, she hasn’t been that well known at all – until recently. The photobook and associated exhibitions in Paris and London, the result of her winning the Carmignac Foundation Photojournalism Award last year, helped bring her to the attention of Martin Parr, current president of Magnum Photos. On 30 June, after the agency’s annual general meeting in Paris, she was announced as one of six new entries to the Magnum family. Tavakolian was one of two women, alongside the US-born photographer Carolyn Drake, and the only photographer from anywhere in the Middle East.

“We were impressed with her work, from the documentary project on the Hajj, to her more recent portraits,” Parr tells BJP. “The fact that she is an Iranian woman is another plus point, as we are keen to support diversity, and to find emerging talent outside of Europe and America.”

Tavakolian used that very personal image of her and her friend, she says, to acknowledge the importance of the family photo album in Iranian society. Such yellowed, time-beaten books – seen in the West as an anachronism in the age of the Facebook – remain a precious possession in Iran. “For most of these albums, the content is familiar,” she says. “An endless flow of snapshots of family gatherings with birthday cakes for newborn babies and children growing up in the new Islamic Republic, summer evenings in lush gardens, family gatherings on Shab-e Yalda, the winter solstice.

“The families may differ,” she says. “But the living rooms remain the same, with carpets and furniture dating from before the 1979 revolution. Whether we knew it or not, we were all middle class, sharing the same values, and dreaming of progress and better lives.”

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.