Over the past year, in Iran, everything has changed. The protest movement, born following the death in police custody, for an ill-fitting veil, of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, on September 16, 2022, upset the order issued by power. Certainly, the shackles of the regime are still as oppressive as ever, but for the past year, women have dared more than before to remove their veil, which has been compulsory in the country since the Islamic revolution of 1979. A symbol of emancipation which men are keen to more and more united. They intervene more readily when women are harassed or intimidated. Out of solidarity, some even go out into the street wearing shorts, also banned in Iran.
At a time when the country’s borders still remain closed to foreign media, particularly the written press, the series of photographs “Woman, life, freedom” – the triptych which has become the rallying cry of the protest in Iran – created by Siamak Amiri is of incredible importance. Personal and journalistic approaches intertwine. All the images were taken between the months of March and August 2023. They show young women who participated in the demonstrations, their hair blowing in the wind, sometimes even dyed, smoking, chatting with friends, wearing group t-shirts of metal, sporting tattoos… A freedom which, in Iran, reflects great courage and the will to fight.
Some let their faces show, while others, for safety reasons, turn their heads away. Above all, the photographer captured them in public space, which he had not done during the mobilization, worried about police repression. But he could never bring himself to sign images that were not those of the street. “Life, audacity, resistance, the real struggle took place outside. All the ideas that crossed my mind for a project outside this framework seemed weak and meaningless to me,” he explains.
The time of resistance
The Iranian began his series once the protests had been suppressed, when “the resistance has entered a new phase”, according to him. “If a collapse of the existing political system is not on the agenda, we are in the middle of a social revolution,” he analyzes.
Each image tells an aspect of the profound changes underway in Iranian society: women without veils, ready to pay a high price to speak out against this discrimination, others standing up against misogyny within their own families, parents finally in solidarity with their children aspiring to a freer life… So many new developments which do not only affect the capital, Tehran, but also other cities, including the most conservative, Isfahan, in the center of the country.
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