The Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian began her career as a photojournalist but, one after another, the publications in which her pictures appeared in Tehran were banned. In 2002, she switched her focus from news to art, though the boundaries between the two are porous. She took this photograph in 2011 as part of a project that featured professional Iranian female singers who, since the 1979 revolution, had been banned from performing or recording solo because of the regime’s interpretation of Islamic law.
Tavakolian made images of the singers as if they were in recording studios, mouthing their words or, as she described it, “performing in their mind in front of a large audience”; she also made imaginary album covers, like this one, for her muted divas. “For me,” she said, “a woman’s voice represents a power that if you silence it, imbalances society, and makes everything deform. I let Iranian women singers perform through my camera while the world has never heard them.” The project was called Listen. The ban on solo singing is still in place.
Tavakolian’s image is included in a new exhibition of images from the Magnum agency devoted to Women Power. Some of the photos were taken by pioneering female photographers (Inge Morath, Eve Arnold), and others by men (Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt) “who have been able to narrate the female condition”. The Magnum agency itself was not always synonymous with feminism. I remember once asking Arnold how she had been treated as a young woman among those alpha male war photographers. “I was patted on the head by them, of course,” she said, “[Inge and I] both had problems with all these difficult men. But I recently had my 90th birthday and I’ve been getting all kinds of faxes telling me what fun we had… So I guess we must have done…”
