TEHRAN, Iran — As I prepared to take a photograph of an anti-American mural outside of the former U.S. Embassy in Iran’s capital recently, a passerby called out to me.
“Take any picture you like, they’ll remove all of them later,” the man said.
It was a telling moment as the murals have long been a feature of the U.S. Embassy compound, which has been held and run by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as a cultural center since the 1979 student-led hostage crisis there destroyed ties between Iran and the United States. Today, Iran is talking to America about a possible diplomatic deal over its nuclear program and the idea of ties between the West and the outside world again seems possible, though difficult.
The thing about taking pictures and working as a photojournalist in Tehran, my hometown, is that Iranians will come up to you in the street and tell you what they think. And sometimes, even when they won’t say something out loud, I’ll see it in the images I capture.
That’s particularly true with the gradual change we have seen in how women dress, whether in ancient corridors of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar or in the tony streets of northern Tehran. Women are forgoing the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, even as hard-liners try to pressure a renewed enforcement of the law against what they call the “Western Cultural Invasion.”
The government of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has meanwhile been urging restraint by police and others over the hijab. There are enough problems right now in Iran is their thought, particularly as Iran’s economy remains in dire straits.
U.S. sanctions have decimated it. Iran’s rial currency has plummeted in recent years. That economic hardship has made people more distrustful of the country’s theocracy.
And so people continue their daily lives in Tehran as they wait for any news after five rounds of talks so far between Iran and the U.S. You can see it in my photos. A carpet-seller waits to sell his wares in a darkened bazaar corner. Women without hijabs smoke shisha, or water-pipe tobacco. Another woman, wearing an all-black, all-encompassing chador, prays in a mosque’s courtyard.
It can all appear contradictory, but that’s life here. Tehran, home to some 10 million people, is the ever-growing beating heart of Iran. And as it awaits the results of the negotiations, it can feel like it is skipping beats in anticipation.
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