Set against the cityscape of post-revolution Iran, Tehran 2006 focuses on the reality of everyday life and the ordinary in extraordinary times.

The project differs from the usual representations of Iran; the social documentary/journalistic approach – or the constructed images often on a ‘big’ subject, favoured by some photographers working in Iran – or ‘abstract’ photography with a poetic slant – or the tendency to ‘exoticise’ (in photography, or video). Rather, it echoes contemporary Iranian cinema, often using non-actors and focusing on an apparently ‘small’ subject, treated allegorically to allude to wider social issues.

Considering Iran’s present isolation, with people under pressure from both inside and outside, the work takes an unusual approach to the notion of ‘exile’: how people may feel ‘exiled’ in their own country, without necessarily being politically involved. Some cannot leave because of their financial or political situation – and some could, but have no place to go. They are not welcome in the outside world. So the only choice for the majority as the current slogans on the billboards around the city confirm, is to ‘follow the Ayatollahs’ way’.

All the characters ‘play’ themselves; the crowd is a mixture of people who are struggling and have been let down by the promises of revolution; a taxi driver, factory worker, builder, cleaner, dressmaker, servant, caretaker etc… This is to indicate that it will be these people who are already living on the edge, who will be hit most, if the economic sanction continues, or in the advent of military action. At another level, and in view of the current ‘dispute’: Iran as a threat or a victim, to focus on ordinary life and everyday reality could suggest: a. Iranians are not necessarily a threat (as some international communities certainly fear), and b. Iranians cannot easily be intimidated by the external threat (as the Americans, in particular, attempt to do) and life goes on and people survive. These views are strongly shared by the majority in Iran today.

So conceptually the project concentrates on survival and uses the notion of ‘waiting’, in a sense akin to that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as a metaphor for the bleak situation facing Iranians today.

Details are significant as a subtle way of commenting on social issues. Some narratives signify the different ways in which people are ‘stuck’ in their daily activities; a taxi is broken down, a woman’s chador is caught in the bush. Or the notion of ‘stuckness’ is conveyed more abstractly; a man is ‘hindered’ by the car, a woman by the tree. Others imply ‘waiting’; a young man is sitting on his own on the edge of the field, a woman is picnicking alone, an old man seems to have just stopped, staring at the ground, two women are waiting at end of the road; both devices (being ‘stuck’ and ‘waiting’) are used as a metaphor to indicate the impossibility of progress, socially or politically in the current climate, and how people are waiting for something to happen; a change/a better life! If one interpretation of Waiting for Godot is waiting for death, it fits well with people’s anticipation of the war at present and the encouragement of martyrdom portrayed in the form of a billboard in the background.

More than ever, America’s authoritarian discourse and now the threat of war have ‘supported’ the anti-western slogans and the regime’s reinforcement of nationalism, and paradoxically have united different communities with conflicting views/opinions in Iran. The majority resents the idea of being ‘bullied’ by America and unanimously believes that Iran should have the right to obtain nuclear capabilities. And yet the panoramic photograph portrays a crowd which, viewed from a distance seems united (in the sense that it is a crowd occupying the same space) but on closer inspection, is disconnected; there is a sense of isolation, non-communication, with people heading in different directions; signifying a ‘lost crowd’ in this newly built landscape of post-revolution, indicating the temporariness of unity and the instability of national identity.

The work is a development of Border, my previous project on Iranians in exile in the UK.

Shot in London, Border portrays individuals on their own in an ‘unfamiliar’ environment; there is a sense of displacement, solitude, creating a mise-en-scene which is unsettling. Shot in Tehran, the panoramic image portrays a crowd in a ‘familiar’ environment, yet the image still connotes a sense of seclusion; stressing the ‘alienation’ felt by Iranians today.

What links the two projects is ‘hardship’ and isolation on both sides of the ‘border’, dismantling the fantasy Iranians may have of both the West or the East. Those who live in Iran tend to idealize life in the West and those who live outside long for ‘home’. But what both groups have in common is the will to survive, evident in the stories of the participants in these two projects, and the pursuit of pleasure. In this climate of fear and uncertainty, a woman is still enjoying her picnic (a popular activity in Iran), a man is carrying his flower pot, a woman is letting her child wear red shiny shoes, at odds with her own codes of Islamic dressing and the child’s compulsory veiling at school, a woman is putting on her red scarf, the most visible colour in a society that women are encouraged to remain invisible, and the young couple are acting upon the forbidden, looking ‘intimate’ and happy in each others company. These details may seem trivial, but they have meaningful implications, as Azar Nafisi observes “they reaffirm life […] restore the dignity that is taken away from people when they become too much of a collective when they are constantly formulated and summarized into categories and definitions. Individuals – even when forced into uniformity though the imposition of repressive ideology – still manage to preserve their individuality, their uniqueness. They are proof of vulnerability of the totalitarian state…” (Azar Nafisi, ‘Lust for Life’, The Guardian Weekend July 1 2006)

These little moments of pleasure and minor ‘rebellions’ also help people to survive. To survive is ultimately to have the capacity to negotiate new positions, which means the necessary redefinition of the past and present. To survive is also not to give up, (and in one definition) not to give in to whatever ordeal one is facing; it is, in a less orthodox way, to ‘resist’! As Homi Bhabha argues “…survival is also a strategy of resistance, even if it is less spectacular in its self-presentation […] those who are the victims of oppression and injustice also bear the burden of survival, of making their lives work, in the harshest condition. We should learn from their present and persistent experience, their workaday witness, even when we project them as subversives or subalterns who carry the burden of historical transformation and political exemplarity, the burden of our hopes,” (‘homi bhabha and mitra tabrizian in conversation’ in ‘Beyond the limits’, Steidl, 2004).