Velenjak1

“We didn’t want any portrait or a fake portrait, but asked them to show us their most realistic daily life,” Bossan says. “Being so realistic was a problem for some of them, because it portrays exactly what is private. To smoke, to drink, to go dancing, to make love without being married.” Bossan became fascinated by the competing spheres of Iranian identity while visiting the country in 1989. It was ten years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution and overthrowing of the Shah, and Iran had adopted strict social, religious and political regulations that included limits on public speech, imposing dress codes for women, and enforcing prohibitions on alcohol.
Despite the recent election of Hassan Rouhani — a more liberal-seeming president than Ahmadinejad was — things haven’t loosened up much. Smoking has since been outlawed, and access to the Internet remains restricted. Even dancing can be risky, but in a country where 65% of the population are under 30, subversion is inevitable. During his visit, Bossan could sense a tension between the strict public face of post-revolutionary Iran with another way of life carrying on behind the drawn blinds of Iranian homes and private spaces. What he never saw were the photographs that illuminated this hidden aspect of its culture. “I saw more pictures, more stories related to people in the streets, revolution, religion, chador,” he says, “but no interesting work of them inside their houses, and specifically inside their living rooms.” Those are the photos he tried to get with Iranian Living Rooms. Throughout the book’s 15 stories, we are shown the day-to-day lives of Iranian people young and old, leading lives not at all different from those led by folks throughout the States. We also see the secret costume parties, nail salons, makeup styles, and questionable habits like smoking and drinking that are common to most cultures — the difference here is that many of these activities could carry stiff penalties for the subjects of the photos. Iranian Living Rooms aims to engage Western readers with a slice of Iranian life they wouldn’t otherwise see, and in doing so demonstrate how undifferentiated the two cultures really are.

Browse More Articles

Tweet

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.