A Rare Intimate Glimpse Into Private Lives in Iran

Wired.com

Iran remains largely misunderstood by many of us in the West. As a theocratic country kept under rigid social, religious, and media restrictions, it’s difficult to relate to. And in the absence of much tourism or Western media based in Iran, for many Americans the country is a blank canvas for their own assumptions and conjectures.

Iranian Living Rooms by photographer Enrico Bossan tries to close that distance. It’s a book of photographs taken in the domestic havens where Iranians, very much like the wider Western world, indulge in drink, smoking, sex and radical ideas. It’s where they express the casual lifestyles that thrive despite the preferences of Iran’s government.

To get a glimpse behind the official party lines, Bossan decided against taking the photos himself. Instead, he asked 15 young photographers already living in the country to document the Iran they know better than anyone.

“Not many [outsiders] know,” says Bossan, “because unless you are going to be traveling inside the country — say you have a friend and you have the possibility to go to a dinner with some Iranians in a private house — you will see another kind of country. I don’t like to invite someone to shoot a world they don’t know. I believe that it’s better that somebody shoot or tell a story about what they know.”

In March of 2013, as the country’s election approached, Bossan and a colleague created a private Facebook page where young Iranian photographers could submit their portfolios. They got more than 60 applications, and after visiting the country to hold meetings and clandestine workshops the list was finally shortened to 15. Each photographer had their own ideas and proposals for the project — Bossan’s job was to curate their ideas and coach the photographers remotely as they gathered the images that eventually made up the book. One requirement was that they had to document the lives of people they knew, to share their personal view of authentic daily life.

“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.

The book also allowed a young generation of Iranian photographers their first chance for international exposure. As the editorial head of Fabrica, a communications thinktank owned by global fashion giant Benetton, Bossan could offer the photographers resources for refining and publishing their work. However, the photographers also risked punishment if the project ran afoul of the government,

“To protect them, we decided not to show every picture online — we talked with them, and we talked with my friend, the curator and the writers, we proposed to have a list of pictures on an embargo to save them from any kind of attack from inside based on religion or politics.“

Even after the launch, some problems came up. Due to U.S. embargoes, the book was automatically denied payment service through Paypal, but the misunderstanding was resolved quickly. The book — its ornate cover a nod to the distinctive Iranian carpets — remains for sale online only.

Bossan plans to revisit the formula that made Iranian Living Rooms a success. To him, it represents a more honest look at its subject, less prone to the prejudices of a photographer who’s influenced by the imposed isolation between the regular folk of our respective cultures.

“We can see this in many other countries of the world,” Bossan says. “The [common] attitude about how to represent Iran is completely false in terms of the reality.”