WALK ON MY EYES
In 2005, when president Ahmadinejad was elected, I started a project on the Iranian society. I felt that with the arrival of this populist and extremist president the divide between how the West viewed Iran and the country I knew was growing at a very fast pace.
I thus set out to portray a society that is more vast, human and intricate then the stereotypes weighing it down since the Islamic Revolution. I started investigated the Iranian psyche and national identity trough the prism of the single individuals.
I am particularly drawn by the theatricality and the complexity of the Iranian society: the profound religiousness of the Iranians in spite of the regime’s cynical use of religion; the constant clash between modernity and tradition, often within the same person; the obsessive research of personal success in a system dominated by collective values, in which sufferance is upheld as a value.
I want to show that the Iranians can be surprising, droll, audacious, insolent and unsatisfied. As a consequence they are not a homogeneous block, as the regime would like us to believe.
I have worked against the backdrop of important political events: the emerging of Iran as a nuclear and regional power; the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution; the fraudulent reelection of Ahmadinejad; the birth of the Green Movement and its violent repression.
It is at this precise moment, when Iran finds itself geographically and strategically in the middle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cause of much tension between the US, China and Russia, that a closer, more intimate look to its people becomes important.



















![Seyed Bagher Khosrowshahi, 60, is originally from Tabriz, but grew up in Tehran and studied in the religious city of Qom. He teaches ‘Divine Matters’ at a religious school in the capital and has both male and female students, though in separate classes.’ He lives and works in the poorer districts of south Tehran, where support for Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is strongest. In his view Shiism is the glue that has held Iran together: ‘what we did with the revolution was not perfect, but the Shiite religion saved this country. Any other nation under attack from so many sides [during the Iran-Iraq war] would have collapsed.’
Iran, Tehran, August 2006.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a74d07_cdcfe3191c05408d8579c8f19134725b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_310,h_309,fp_0.43_0.32,q_90/a74d07_cdcfe3191c05408d8579c8f19134725b~mv2.jpg)




