Iran Series

In 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was unexpectedly elected as IranÕs president, I began a photo project on Iranian society. I felt that with the arrival of this populist and extremist to the presidency, the divide between how the West viewed Iran and the country I knew was going to grow at a very fast pace.

I thus set out to portray a society that is more diverse, human and complex than the stereotypes that have personified it since the Islamic Revolution. I started investigating the Iranian psyche and national identity through the prism of its individual members. I am particularly drawn by the theatricality and the duality of Iranian society: the profound religiousness of the Iranians in spite of the regimeÕs cynical use of religion; the constant clash between modernity and tradition, often within the same person; the obsessive quest for personal success in a system dominated by collective values, in which suffering is upheld as a value in its own right.

I wanted to show that the Iranians can be surprising, droll, audacious, insolent and dissatisfied Ð not the homogeneous mass the regime would like us to believe.

With auteur Serge Michel, I have worked against the backdrop of major political events: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear and regional power, the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, the fraudulent reelection of Ahmadinejad, the birth of the Green Movement and its violent repression.