Iran as seen by the west is a visually guarded country. We receive little in terms of imagery of daily life in Iran, yet can conjure a mental image of one of cultural and political oppression as portrayed by the media. It is this stereotype that the exhibition "Iran 1979-2009, Entre L'espoir et le chaos" tries to circumvent. The exhibition juggles between images of routine existence and images of protests and war. In covering Iranian documentary photography over the last thirty years, it is impossible to not fall back on this visual cliche. Between the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, and the recent protests of June 2009, there was much material in terms of images of what the title refers to as "chaos".
The exhibition opens with anonymous photographs from the events of June 2009. In the images, police with clubs chase down suspected protesters. Fires break out, turban clad women engage in fighting, dissidents hold up their hands in solidarity against the regime, and all the while, in the background, spectators record the events with their cell phone digital cameras. Compared with the photographs in the exhibition of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the imagery is astonishingly similar; fighting in the streets, crowds of protesters. However, the major difference between the two is that now no one will confess to taking these new protest photographs. While the photographs from the Iranian Revolution serve as a source of pride to the photographers and to the government of Iran, the stigma of the recent protest photographs add to their mystery and power.
Photographs from the Iran-Iraq War feed further into the Western conceptions of Iranian photography. There are blurry and grainy images of combat, gunmen shooting, and city centers left in carnage. The most eery image of the series is Kaueh Kazemi's "Fine de Guerre" from December 1988, where women in full turban teach a group of students how to wear a gas mask properly. During the Iran-Iraq War, it is said that Sudam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian civilians, and the image seems to be a kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare of the future.
The most striking images, however, are those showing daily life in Iran. There are images of a group of young men engage in a game of soccer, a series of black and white street scenes, portraits of women in their bedrooms. in Maijd Saeedi"s "La Piscine", two fashionable young women in sunglasses lounge on a rooftop pool near the ocean. In Mohammad Tehan's "4 November, 2007", a street cleaner passes a wall of intricate graffiti, depicting the Statue of Liberty with a skeleton face, an American flag, and the country of Iran. These quotidian images show a much more complex picture of Iran today yet are overshadowed by the sheer quantity of chaos imagery. While the exhibition tries to show the full picture of Iran today, in the end it is apparently not that easy to step out of such cemented visual tropes.
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