Shadi Ghadirian

Shadi Ghadirian, born in Tehran in 1974, continues to live and work in the city today. As a member of a post-revolutionary generation, she grew up with the promises of global cultural dialogue made by President Mohammad Khatami, who governed until 2005. Khatami’s assurances of improving women's status and addressing the concerns of younger generations sparked in Ghadirian a need to express her discomfort and emotions through photography that challenges international preconceptions about women's roles in an Islamic state.

Her works depict, with irony, a feminine identity that explores the relationship between modernization and tradition. Two years after graduating, Ghadirian married photographer Payman Houshmandzadeh. She received many wedding gifts, all related to domestic chores, and suddenly found herself confronting the daily responsibilities of home life. Learning to cook, iron, and clean, she navigated her roles as a housewife, photographer, and wife. This new life inspired her series Like Every Day, featuring women clad not in the traditional black chador, prevalent in many Iranian images, but in richly decorated, colorful, feminine, and soft chadors that women traditionally wear at home to welcome guests.

Ghadirian plays with the contrast between her faceless subjects dressed in these “domestic” chadors and everyday household items like irons, brooms, teapots, teacups, pots and pans, rubber gloves, and tools. She reflects, “Portraits were banned in Islamic countries two hundred years ago, yet there have been photographic portraits in Iran for over 150 years. It fascinates me that people want to immortalize their faces, and especially to see that in most photographs, they don't even look like themselves. Faces have a special meaning for me: as soon as I see someone, I can understand what kind of person they are, whether I like them or not.”

The strength of her work lies in her rational use of tools rooted in tradition, inspired by the painted and photographic portraits typical of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925. The Iannaccone Collection includes two photographs titled after this dynasty, created at the end of the 1990s. Each detail is meticulously crafted by the artist: from the backgrounds to the postures of the models, to their retro-inspired clothing. Ghadirian entrusts her subjects with objects from modernity, prompting viewers to question whether a radio or a telephone truly symbolize opposition to the veil.

This interplay of paradoxes is also evident in two photographs from the series Nil Nil, created in 2008, where objects of war are introduced into daily life. The stark contrast arising from the juxtaposition of these two types of objects—military and domestic—reminds us that conflicts, near or far from our homes, persist every day, even as we continue our tranquil domestic routines.