NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN

Tavakolian started her career as a self-taught photojournalist at the age of 16, and has covered wars and natural disasters, and produced photo documentaries in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Pakistan and Yemen. One of few female photographers in this context, she gained international success with work published in magazines and newspapers such as Time, Newsweek, Stern, Le Figaro, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and National Geographic.

Over the past few years, while the conditions for her photojournalistic work in Iran became increasingly difficult, she developed several art projects–still maintaining a largely documentary style–focusing particularly on women’s issues, through projects such as Mother of Martyrs (2006) and The Day I Became a Woman (2010).

‘Look’, Tavakolian’s most recent series, consists of staged large-scale photographs in which lone subjects are framed against a window view of high-rise buildings. All shot at the same evening hour, the images are permeated with a cold bluish note, giving them a richly cinematic quality. Seen together, the individual photographs form a collective, testifying to a mood and a condition which Tavakolian describes as follows:

‘Look began with my desire to look deeply into the lives of people around me whom I have known for over ten years, and who live in my building. I wanted to bring to life the story of a nationof middle class youths who are constantly battling with themselves, their isolated conformed society, their lack of hope for the future and each of their individual stories. Over a period of six months, at 8 pm, I fixed my camera on a tripod in front of the window where I had watched the same view of the city for ten years. I tried to capture a moment of each of their stories, within the frame of a window looking out onto the cold concrete buildings which surround us daily.’