Shahnaz

Iran remains largely misunderstood by many of us in the West. As a theocratic country kept under rigid social, religious, and media restrictions, it’s difficult to relate to. And in the absence of much tourism or Western media based in Iran, for many Americans the country is a blank canvas for their own assumptions and conjectures. Iranian Living Rooms by photographer Enrico Bossan tries to close that distance. It’s a book of photographs taken in the domestic havens where Iranians, very much like the wider Western world, indulge in drink, smoking, sex and radical ideas. It’s where they express the casual lifestyles that thrive despite the preferences of Iran’s government.

To get a glimpse behind the official party lines, Bossan decided against taking the photos himself. Instead, he asked 15 young photographers already living in the country to document the Iran they know better than anyone.
“Not many [outsiders] know,” says Bossan, “because unless you are going to be traveling inside the country — say you have a friend and you have the possibility to go to a dinner with some Iranians in a private house — you will see another kind of country. I don’t like to invite someone to shoot a world they don’t know. I believe that it’s better that somebody shoot or tell a story about what they know.”
In March of 2013, as the country’s election approached, Bossan and a colleague created a private Facebook page where young Iranian photographers could submit their portfolios. They got more than 60 applications, and after visiting the country to hold meetings and clandestine workshops the list was finally shortened to 15. Each photographer had their own ideas and proposals for the project — Bossan’s job was to curate their ideas and coach the photographers remotely as they gathered the images that eventually made up the book. One requirement was that they had to document the lives of people they knew, to share their personal view of authentic daily life.