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Woman on a mountainside outside Tehran. “A lot of the photo albums in Iran from 20 or 30 years ago have the same stock landscape shot on the front: a green and flowery mountainside, beautiful and hopeful. I wanted to find my own homage to the stock mountain photograph, so I located this dry, abandoned mountain in Tehran. It’s the polar opposite: desolate, flowerless, almost hopeless. I chose nine people, people who I thought represented my generation, and took them to the mountain to find the one spot that really called to them. Somayyeh chose this tree. I’ve known Somayyeh for eight years. She is from a very conservative part of the country, just outside Isfahan. For years, she lived in this town with her family and dreamed of going to Tehran. When she did, the city changed her: she wasn’t able to be invisible in her home town, but in Tehran she found anonymity and she divorced her husband. Somayyeh is fighting every day to find a space for herself in the world – I really admire her”. (Photo by Newsha Tavakolian)
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