Restless Anahita

My focus since first returning to my motherland in 2017 has been to bridge a gap between the two cultures that have formed me. With each new series of travels & photographic expeditions, I seek out under-explored & less revealed people & places of Iran.
Annual odysseys to the Middle East continued throughout the pandemic, travels navigated carefully as I crisscrossed the country from the Caspian Coast to the Persian Gulf. Looking through my catalog of over 200,000 photos from these past six years, I began focusing on the unique & colorful traditional garb of Iranian women in different localities. In a country where religious law, tradition, climate, & function dictate clothing, beauty oftentimes is expressed through garments, as faces & hair are usually covered up. In the traditional Iranian view, the ideal society was one in which women were confined to the home, performing the various domestic tasks associated with managing a household & rearing children. Men worked in the public sphere, that is, in the fields, factories, bazaars, & offices. While that is no longer the present state of affairs, outside of urban centers & particularly in rural areas, the tradition of wearing hand-sewn, bright colored & bejeweled dress remains, woven into the fabric of different ethnicities & tribes.
This exhibition will highlight just that, a variegated, parti-colored passage through the rainbow of traditional cloth. Selections of worn fabrics & patterns from various provinces will be spotlighted, with people photographed both in their daily lives as well as non-traditional settings. The images for the exhibition will draw from never before seen selections of my previous work, as well as what an extended recent trek to the region, from September 2022 thru February 2023, yielded.