The New York Times - JUNE 16, 2014
TEHRAN
— I took a series of photographs of myself in 2007 that show me sitting
on the toilet, weighing myself, and shaving my legs in the bath. I shot
them as an angry response to an encounter with a gallery owner in
London’s artsy Brick Lane. I had offered him photos of colorful chadors —
an attempt to question the black chador as the icon of Iran
by showing the world that Iranian women were more than this piece of
black cloth. The gallery owner wasn’t impressed. “Do you have any photos
of Iranian women in their private moments?” he asked.
As
an Iranian with a reinforced sense of the private-public divide we
navigate daily in our country, I found his curiosity offensive. So I
shot my “Private Moments” in a sardonic spirit, to show that Iranian
women are like all women around the world if you get past the visual
hurdle of the hijab. But I never shared those, not just because I would
never get a permit to show them publicly in Iran, but also because I am
prepared to go only so far to prove a point. Call me old-fashioned.
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