Covert Country

LAST SPRING, the Italian photographer Nicola Zolin joined a group of about 20 young men and women from Tehran on a beach camp on the island of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf. They spent a day swimming and partying, savouring a freedom from the social control of the capital. But the good times did not last. On the second day, police arrived, and demanded that they leave. Zolin, as the sole foreigner, was singled out for particular attention. He recalled being screamed at: how dare he be in the company of Iranian girls in such a situation? The camp broke up.

Zolin was on a three-month trip right across Iran, moving from the country’s north-west to its deep south-east, meeting and photographing ordinary Iranians—particularly urban youth. His approach, as on all his documentary projects, was deeply immersive. “When people are partying,” he said, “I am partying with them. When people are praying, I am praying with them.” He was impressed with Iranians’ deep sense of history and open-hearted generosity, but also quickly noted a bitterness about the country’s strict theocratic government, in power since the Islamic Revolution brought down a monarchy, headed by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in 1979. “I could feel the frustration and depression of many,” he said. “I could feel how tradition, and the imposition of systemic rules, act as cages for the human spirit.” But, he added, people have learnt “to enjoy limited, and sometimes clandestine, spaces of freedom in a very special way.”

Many of Zolin’s photographs distil moments of this limited, special freedom—a day at the beach, women smoking in a café, or a girl in an evening gown getting ready to go out. Zolin is determined that such images figure in the world’s view of “a society that is widely misunderstood,” he said, both because of the Iranian government’s restrictions on the work of journalists, and because of the international media’s propensity to denounce a country bucking Western pressures and charting its own way. Iran is changing rapidly, he said, as young people swallow “fragments of global culture through social media.” Many of his subjects “are citizens of a parallel and covert country: a post-Islamic republic of Iran, with a strong grip on traditional Persian culture and a growing disaffection with the values imposed by the revolution.”

During the late 1970s, the noted Iranian photojournalist Abbas journeyed across the country to document the Islamic revolution. His black-and-white images captured people in their homes, in the streets—and even in death. At a demonstration in support of the Shah at a Tehran stadium in 1979, Abbas photographed a smiling woman holding a folded banknote bearing the monarch’s image over her right eye, to illustrate the Iranian saying “You are the light of my eyes.” Almost three decades later, Zolin photographed a banknote featuring the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, being used to roll a joint. Yet Abbas, like Zolin, also captured Iranians enjoying moments of clandestine freedom, such as a young couple lost in conversation at a mountain getaway outside Tehran, escaping the moral policing in the post-revolutionary capital. Clearly, while much has changed in the intervening years, much has not.

Zolin’s style bears the influence of some of the old masters who have inspired him—in particular, Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier—Bresson, Elliot Erwitt and René Burri. Like much of their work, his photographs make candid, everyday scenes remarkable. Zolin earlier preferred to shoot in black and white, much as his predecessors did, but eventually started to feel that the medium was anachronistic. He turned to colour, he said, because “I want my photographs to speak the language of the time we are living.”