Intrigued by the “hidden” lives of marginalized and dispossessed individuals in Iran, photographer Shayan Sajadian enjoys, perhaps unintentionally, subverting norms; seeing weakness as power, and power as weakness, showing the country’s women wielding their power, and its men expressing their tenderness and vulnerability. He tells Dalia Al-Dujaili about his journey, how he creates such an honest depiction of his subjects and how he subverts the expectations the world might have about his home given its strict authoritarian laws.
Shayan Sajadian’s path to photography began unexpectedly during his time as an architectural student at Shiraz University. His initial motivation was pragmatic: to enhance his understanding of architecture through visual documentation. But he didn’t stop there. He wanted to have a better look at things, he says, especially areas he’d never explored before. His exploration took him to the older parts of Shiraz, where he encountered marginalized communities, including individuals struggling with addiction and poverty. The encounters struck a personal chord for Sajadian, whose own family had been affected by addiction, leading him to reflect on the unseen lives within his city. “My grandfather lost everything due to addiction,” he says.
Depicting the reality of life in Iran’s underbelly is, for Sajadian, a complicated endeavor, given the difficult nature of photographing within the country, especially since the Mahsa Amini protests. (Iranian people took to the streets against the government following the death of Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini, in police custody, after she was arrested by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly.”) “After that, the camera became a gun in the streets,” as it always has been from a government perspective, Sajadian tells me. He recalls one incident where he was lucky to escape a mugging in the desert; his camera was retrieved after a day. Nevertheless, many of his subjects are keen to share their stories, and they offer a stark contrast to the sanitized or overly exotic portrayal of Iran often depicted in Western media.
“You can see [my subjects] are not monsters,” he says, referring to images of intimidatingly muscular men adorned with intricate and heavy tattoos, standing in alleyways or under street lights. “Because most of them are criminals, most of society believe that they are dangerous people. But I don’t see them this way. I’m not defending them. They have lots of bad sides, but they are human.” His photographs reveal genuine nuance, where modernity coexists with tradition, affluence with poverty, and religious conservatism with secularism.
People see me because of my photos, but these people do not have anything to represent themselves.
The tattoos visible in Sajadian’s photographs interrupt popular imaginations of a hyper-religious Iranian society, and expose its diverse reality—a society where conservatism is mixed with stark secularism, and where tattoos are technically a religious and cultural taboo, “reminiscent of a time when only criminals would don the ink,” he says. They act as a visual narrative of the individual’s life; they can signify a personal journey, a memory, or a statement of beliefs and affiliations. And they take their visual cues from traditional Persian stories and legends, an age-old art which Persian culture is famous for, such as Shahnameh, the national epic poem of Greater Iran by Ferdowsi, Sajadian explains.
To get these shots, the photographer must induce a vulnerability and safety in his subjects where the ground for intimacy is fertile. These individuals, often from marginalized backgrounds, trust Sajadian to portray their lives authentically despite the risks associated with being photographed in Iran. Aside from the images of men with bare chests, arms and backs, the relaxed nature of his subjects doesn’t just run skin deep. One image shows a young man resting dolefully on his rudimentary motorbike in front of a giant graffiti football. It’s a strikingly universal scene of the playfulness of adolescence. Surprisingly at ease, the young man was eager rather than hesitant to have his image taken, even posing in a picturesque way. “People see me because of my photos,” Sajadian tells me, “they see you because of your writing. But these people do not have anything to represent themselves.” In this way, they are almost desperate to be seen, and to be seen through a humanistic lens, too.
The visual narrative crafted by Sajadian is a tapestry of contrasts, making him perhaps one of the most exciting image-makers in the region. His photographs capture moments of vulnerability and strength, often blurring the lines between traditional gender roles. Women wielding guns on horseback, from the Iranian nomadic tribes of the North, or men displaying tender camaraderie, challenge stereotypes, offering a nuanced perspective on gender dynamics in Iranian society. “I want to show their power as a weakness and their weakness as a power,” Sajadian explains, aiming to dismantle simplistic binaries that dominate public discourse.
Photographing women especially has come with its fair share of obstacles. Understandably, Iranian women are hypervigilant around cameras, but many are also determined to be seen wielding their power and their civil rights in protest to some of Iran’s most authoritarian laws. Sajadian explains that nomads used to wield political power, but have been suppressed under all governance in Iran over decades. Interestingly, “you could see in their family, the woman has power, not [always] the man,” says Sajadian of some specific cases. Since the Mahsa Amini protests, “I decided to take this photo for Iranian women,” says Sajadian, honoring feminine power in his society and highlighting the ongoing, sometimes fatal fight for women’s rights.
Among his notable works is a series featuring young men in Shiraz, captured in moments of tender male friendship that warp what Eurocentric visual culture attempts to say about the nature of Iranian or West Asian men. Whether holding hands or posing against a backdrop of mountains, such as the sweet smiling gentlemen captured in a restaurant in a mirroring pose, these images challenge perceptions of Middle Eastern masculinity. Sajadian’s approach is not to dictate the viewer’s interpretation but to provoke thought and introspection on the complexities of identity and human connection. Surrendering to companionship, an alternative view of the stoic, isolated and “heroic” male figure, many of the men in Sajadian’s images are unapologetically reliant on one another. Like many countries in the West Asian region, Iran is one that could remain shrouded in misrepresentation if it were not for the work of creatives such as Sajadian.