Shadi Ghadirian: A Woman Photographer from Iran

“Being a woman in Iran is hard, and working as a woman photographer is even harder.”—Shadi Ghadirian

Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran’s leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and her work has been collected by museums worldwide.

She came to the limelight in the late 1990s with her Qajar series, in which she examines the paradoxical position of women in Iran. Women in traditional clothing pose with items such as a mountain bike or a boom box.

Rose Issa is a freelance curator, specializing in contemporary visual arts and films from the Arab world and Iran.