Burgas

Ghajar serie's, Present in the Past
Shadafarin Ghadirian, a fotografia e as mulheres no Irão.

SG - My final project was on women's portraits during the Qajar period [late 18th to early 20th century]. I had spent a lot of time working at the city museum for photography, and I became interested in the history. I became familiar with the techniques of the Qajar period, and I've printed a number of the pictures unto paper. It's a period and a style that I've come to know well.

For the project, I had everything reconstructed, I had a friend who was a painter prepare the backdrop, I borrowed the dresses and made some myself, and so on. I also had the models reenact the poses that you see in the Qajar pictures - back then, photography was still very unusual and intimidating, and I tried to reconstruct the stance that the models would take, which was very different to that of contemporary models.

Until that time, portraits had been forbidden on religious grounds, even paintings. So the impact of photography, once it arrived in Iran, was enormous, it was something radically new - noone had ever seen a portrait before.

A entrevista aqui




Like Everyday s After marriage it was natural that vacuum cleaners and pots and pans found their way into my photographs; a woman with a different look; a woman who, no matter in what part of the world she is living, still has these kinds of apprehensions. At this moment a woman is consigned to a daily repetitive routine. For this reason I named the series Like Every Day. - Shadi Ghadirian.


Hussein Chalayan


Alicia Framis's