Photographer Sia Yazdanfar captures the remote cultures of Iran

Feature photo by Maroupi Sani

The shot is called “Mother’s Little Helper,” but it could also be called “The Persian Mona Lisa.”

The similarities between photographer Sia Yazdanfar’s image and the seminal painting by DaVinci are not subtle.

In Yazdanfar’s photo, the little girl, 10 years old, stands in three-quarter profile to the right of the frame, caught glancing at the camera from the corner of her dark eyes. Behind her, desert mountains wear patches of white snow, the rustic dwellings of this tiny Iranian hamlet — Chenesht, in South Khorasan Province — filling the bottom-right corner in soft focus. And like her Italian cousin, she’s smiling, just a little bit, enough to make you wonder why.

Layers of woven fabrics wrap her shoulders and the top of her head, exposing her smooth, unfurled brow. Bright frills, sequins and coins accessorize the garment. It’s the way women have been dressing in this remote village for more than 500 years, though the older ones cover their faces for modesty’s sake. But Mother’s Little Helper’s face is open, exposed, a rare moment in a country where taking pictures of women is not particularly welcome, little girls even less so. This is the lone uncovered face in the entire exhibit.

This photo and a couple dozen others comprise Restless Anahita, Yazdanfar’s “kaleidoscopic journey through the fabric of female clothing in remote corners of Iran,” his homeland, according to his website. It’s paired with another of Yazdanfar’s exhibits, No Friends but the Mountains, “a glimpse into the daily lives of Kurdish people in the namesake mountainous Kurdistan Province, where untamed landscapes are dotted by stepped villages,home to a unique culture, heritage, and language that has been preserved for centuries,” both on display at Alamance Arts through June.

Almost 7,000 miles away, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, time can stand still. Outside the industrialized cities, in the terrain Yazdanfar has been traversing since 2017, folks exist in mountain isolation or eke it out on the hundred or so tiny islands that dot the Persian Gulf, populating the villages their ancestors built and living in much the same way.

We can see this aspect of timelessness in the images of No Friends but the Mountains: wizened men in a desolate place that could have been taken three centuries ago, had cameras been invented. Even the artist’s technique harkens back to the ancient — he prints his photos for display on paper from Hahnemühle FineArt, a German company that has been making paper since 1584. These prints, colored only with pigment-based inks, should last 200 years.

“I believe the amount of resources and effort that have gone into capturing and processing the images merit presenting them in a way that not only honors the subjects,” Yazdanfar says, “but provides patrons a work of art that can be enjoyed and hopefully inspire for generations to come.”

The bright colors of Restless Anahita weave a throughline to the work. Bright burkas and masks. Tapestries that fold and flow. The light as it passes through the ancient, stained-glass window, painting the mosque floor.

“Autoscape” is a diptych featuring a model posed on the coast of the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. The first, “Exposition,” forms the first act of the autoscape — that sensation of seeing one’s doppelganger, or perhaps hallucinating it. In it, the model stands in profile on the shore, her sandals digging into the red sand, rich in iron oxide. She’s wrapped in a pale, diaphanous sheet, her face obscured, arms forward, the garment draping down like a batwing. In the second, “Denouement,” she’s barefoot on a craggy rise in a bright-blue tunic with arms outstretched, her wrap billowing in the wind behind her, the top half of her face covered by a wide, red mask.

All the models in Restless Anahita — named for the Persian virgin goddess — cover their faces: wide masks that band across the nose, thin slits at the eyes; ornate, bejeweled cutouts with wispy frills; scarves wrapped and layered; delicate filigree outlines that hang from the ears and don’t cover much at all.

“There are a lot of written and unwritten rules about taking pictures in the Middle East,” Yazdabnfar wrote in his notes. “Many of the subjects in my current body of work are people with whom I have spent time with during multiple visits to their villages or towns. In remote places, word of mouth and your reputation go a long way.”

His lone unmasked model, Mother’s Little Helper, came to him like that.

“While I have encountered difficulties in capturing subjects elsewhere,” Yazdanfar wrote in his notes, “nothing compares to my experiences in this place. Images of the villagers are rare, as photography is strictly frowned upon.

“I met a local and hung out with him enough that he let me take a photo of his 10-year-old daughter,” Yazdanfar clarifies.

He also included in the exhibit a shot of the girl’s grandmother, in a wide eye mask and draped in traditional garb, puffing the hookah that Yazdanfar says she smokes all day long.

“I don’t know how she does it,” he says. 

No Friends but the Mountains and Restless Anahita are on display at Alamance Arts in Graham through July 1. Learn more about the artist at siayazdanfar.com.

The world’s largest female surfing event kicks off this weekend and as part of the programme Tracks is hosting a photography challenge where the winner will be featured in the next edition of our mag and will receive an Arcadia Twin surfboard, with a classic Tracks cover inlay, worth $1,375.

Seas The Day festival will be held at Kingscliff Beach from 22-23 June. The event attracts crowds of up to 12,000 people and includes a women’s tag team surf contest, free activities and a number of talks and workshops hosted by ladies in the surf industry.

Any female can enter the Tracks Photography Challenge at the event. Simply shoot some incredible photos at Seas The Day and submit your best photo in each of the following categories by 12pm on 23 June.

You can submit one picture to each of the follow categories:

1. Best surfing shot – Capture the best surf action at the Seas The Day surfing competition.
2. Best mini shredder shot – Capture the most inspiring shot as the Seas The Day U12 mini shredders hit the waves.
3. Best lifestyle shot – The best lifestyle shot capturing the vibe and energy of the festival.
4. Best ‘inside the festivals hubs’ shot – Get inside the hubs and capture some of the inspiring workshops, keynote talks and panel discussions.
5. Best portrait shot – Capture the best portrait shot of a Seas The Day visitor, competitor, talent or surfing legend

Winners will be announced at the end of the Tracks surprise session on Sunday at 2:15 PM in the Film & Photography HUB. Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to get your work recognised and take home an amazing prize. Grab your camera or phone and start shooting at Seas The Day.

To submit your shots click here and fill in the form.

Friendship and adventures aren’t often the stories associated with Australia’s seasonal worker program, but a photographic exhibition has captured just that. 

Seasonal farm workers using disposable cameras have photographed some of their everyday life: picking fruit on farms, camaraderie and unique experiences.

“We’ve been handing out cameras across the state,” explained Kaya Barry, a cultural geographer from Griffith University behind the project.

“They take a bunch of photos and then post them back to me and we get them developed.” 

Lino Uhi from Tonga was one of hundreds of people who participated in a project shining a light on the seasonal workers who keep Australian farms ticking over.

He’s lived and worked in Australia on eight separate occasions.

Each time he has stayed and worked for nine months, and each time on the same farm in regional Queensland.

Every return trip has been driven by the same desire, to support his family back home.

“We pay for my sister, for the kids, for the school and for building [a] house,” Lino Uhi said.

The project aimed to get a sense of what life is like for seasonal workers on Australian farms, through their eyes.

Dr Barry said seasonal workers were not given a lot of space in public discourse and debate.

“I wanted to create a project that celebrated and captured the good times and the good experiences and the quite big contributions that they bring to regional places.”

Opportunity for insight

Across Queensland, it is estimated at times there are more than 20,000 jobs filled by seasonal workers on farms, the majority of which are foreign.

“These people live and work and spend their spare time in a community and having a bit more insight into their everyday life is something that perhaps a local might not ever see,” said Dr Barry.

“They might pass them at the supermarket queue, or they might see them in the street, but they don’t actually get to see from this perspective, their side of what life is like when they’re here in Australia.”

Treloar Guenthroth is the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) and Farm Supervisor on an orchard at Gin Gin, in the Wide Bay region. 

“I supervise all the work that gets done by seasonal workers — so the Tongans or Solomon Islanders, and sometimes we’ll use contractors with Koreans and Japanese, a lot of people from Asia, sometimes Timor, sometimes Samoa,” said Mr Guentrhroth.

While the citrus harvest is underway on the farm at Gin Gin, Mr Guenthroth has encouraged the seasonal workers to participate in the research project to snap photos of their daily lives.

This year, there were 50 seasonal workers on the citrus and blueberry farm, but some years that number was much higher.

Regardless of birthplace, language or culture, Mr Guenthroth said the seasonal workers were unified by a common goal.

“All they want is to improve their life for their family and their country and everyone they’ve got at home,” he said. 

Supporting a group of seasonal workers from different parts of the world was no small feat. Language was a common barrier.

To help, Mr Guenthroth has been learning and practising the different languages spoken by the workers on the farm where he worked.

“A bit of Tongan, not too much but enough to get by, and pidgin, I know a fair bit of pidgin because it’s just broken English,” he said.

“It’s pretty easy to learn and just learning from them, it starts off with all the swearwords and all the fun stuff, and then you progress from there.”

Providing good support to the seasonal workers on farms in Australia is important, especially since many leave behind entire families.

Andrew Makolo is a father of three from the Solomon Islands whose youngest child is still a toddler.

He will be away from his family for nine months, before returning home for a quarter of the year.

“Back home, we a little bit struggled, life is too hard,” said Mr Makolo.

“So when we have the opportunity to come over we can develop our community — send money back for our kids, for school fees and to build houses.”

Tough but rewarding

Over the course of her research, Dr Barry received and collated more than a thousand photos taken on disposable film cameras by seasonal workers across the state.

“I think they tell not quite a story of somebody’s life here, but they show quite nice snippets of what the everyday is like,” Dr Barry said.

“I think it’s really important not to sort of over-glamorise this because it’s tough, hard working conditions, but it is also really rewarding and enjoying.”

Nunes Da Costa Barreto, from Timor Leste, is one of the seasonal workers whose photographs have been included in the exhibition, called Seasonal.

“This is my first-time exhibition,” Mr Da Costa Barreto said.

“I’m so proud of it. And I’m very thankful to Kaya for inviting me here.

“This is amazing for me.”

The “Seasonal” exhibition is currently on show at the Childers Art Space. It will be on show in Brisbane in August, before touring to Gayndah and other regional galleries next year.

What’s more classic Americana than Route 66?

It’s one of the country’s original highways, starting in Illinois and running through the Midwest, Southwest and into California. But Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Edward Keating didn’t take such a rosy view of the roadway.

“It was really important for him not just to document the vistas and the beautiful backdrops of Route 66 from Chicago to L.A., but really document the people, many of whom were left behind, people that moved here with so many hopes and dreams, and a lot of those dreams were shattered,” said his daughter Caitlin Keating, a journalist and documentary filmmaker. “He wanted to document the reality of this highway, not just ‘get your kicks on Route 66.’”

A one-off assignment to photograph Route 66 turned into a years-long labor of love. Now, his work highlighting a more complicated side of the highway memorialized in that famous tune is being shown at Uptown’s Chicago Center for Photojournalism, 1226 W. Wilson Ave.

And for Keating, Route 66 wasn’t just a highway. It was a place to heal while he was on the road during a chaotic time in his life.

“He was about 21 years old, with a major drinking problem, just finding himself on Route 66. And it was the place that he really hit rock bottom,” Caitlin Keating said. “But at the same time, not too long after that, on Route 66 he put his life back together.”

He got sober and made a career as a photographer. Edward Keating spent years on the staff of the New York Times. He worked for weeks at Ground Zero as part of its Pulitzer Prize-winning photography team.

“It was nice to have that acknowledgement, but that’s never why he did it,” his daughter said. “He covered the Kosovo war. He was always running after tough things in life because he just felt like someone had to document it, and he felt like it had to be him.”

One of those things Keating felt called to document was the reality of Route 66. From 2000 to 2011, he made multiple trips, traveled thousands of miles and took tens of thousands of photographs.

“He actually didn’t even develop a lot of the work. He always said that the best part about photography for him was actually taking the picture, not even actually seeing the image in the end,” Caitlin Keating said.

In 2018, Keating published the book “Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66.” He died in 2021 at age 65 of cancer he believed was from exposure to toxic dust at the ruins of the World Trade Center.

“Before that, he stressed how important it was for him to show this work, especially along Route 66,” Caitlin Keating said. “Because this work, he said when he published it in the book, he didn’t own it anymore.

The Chicago stop is one of several exhibitions along Route 66 organized by his daughter, as well as Caitlin’s mother and Keating’s wife Carrie Boretz, also a photographer. Caitlin Keating says bringing her father’s work to galleries along the historic highway offers a chance to show the realities of lost jobs, limited opportunities, struggling small towns – and, the sense of hope and humanity that pervades even the most challenging pictures.

“Some of these images are really hard to look at,” she said. “I just hope that people really still take the time to look and don’t turn away, because if we do, we’re going to forget about the past.”

Seeing the work exhibited at a gallery in the city where Route 66 starts has been emotional and rewarding for Keating’s loved ones.

“I got full chills when I walked in, because this is exactly what he wanted,” Caitlin Keating said. “It just means so much to my entire family. And the only sad part is that he’s not here, but we know that he would be so, so happy with how it turned out.”

“Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66” runs at the Chicago Center for Photojournalism through July 29.

Contact Nick Blumberg: [email protected] | (773) 509-5434 | @ndblumberg