Tavakolian's series Maria consists of several black and white photographs of a woman going about her daily life in her apartment and the streets of Tehran. Tavakolian’s text around these images shares that Maria was born as a male, named Asgar, and underwent a sex-change operation sanctified by the Iranian government. After the operation, when Maria informed her wife, the two told their children that Asgar had died in a trucking accident and subsequently introduced Maria as a distant relative. However, Maria's children disowned her after reading her true story in a gossip newspaper. She now lives alone in downtown Tehran, unable to work as no women work as truck drivers (her former profession), and with no family. Tavakolian's sensitive portraits of Maria capture the difficulty of living in her space, both urban and psychological. The first portrait in the series shows Maria holding up the gossip paper that resulted in the loss of her family. Half of Maria’s face is obscured but matched by the photograph of her on the front page of the paper, wearing a scarf and heavily made up. The symmetry of her face on the paper and in the photograph is Picasso-esque; it is also noteworthy that Tavakolian encourages us to look closely, revealing layers in her photograph that includes another photograph within it, akin to a hall of mirrors. She implies that more readings and stories are there beneath the initial surface of the image. The second image is of Maria's masculine hand, nails painted, over her brassiere. Here, the viewer reads conflicting gender codes within one image, and is not offered an easy solution as Maria’s face and gender exist outside the photographer’s frame. Another image shows Maria’s hands holding out a photograph of herself as Asgar; however, no other details appear in this photograph of a photograph, creating a distinct separation between Maria’s identity and Asgar’s identity. In another, Maria rides alone in a bus, with two younger women wrapped in black headscarves conversing behind her. Their presence, and their active conversation, as evidenced by the blurs of motion, highlights Maria's loneliness and her tenuous, liminal position as a woman without family in Iran. This photograph complements the next in the series, in which Maria is foregrounded in a pool of light, sitting at a restaurant alone with crowds of diners at the darkened tables behind her. Again, Maria is part of the urban scene and simultaneously distinct from it.
Other images in the series show Maria dressing in her Tehran apartment: in her undergarments, posing fully dressed, or applying makeup. The final image in the series displays a pile of suitcases, bags and boxes stacked against a wall: a testament, perhaps to Maria's portability and a sense of mobility, of being able to depart immediately if necessary, again reinforcing her fragile position. Tavakolian forces the viewer to see Maria as an individual in this series, complicating easy ideas of gender binaries. She also pushes at stereotypical Western attitudes of Iran being Islamic and very conservative. This series appears very documentary; Tavakolian’s decision to use black-and-white to capture Maria’s story is also noteworthy. This choice renders the series more akin to photography that appears in the newspaper, and thus more documentary and serious; however the use of the binary black-and-white could also be a playful poke at the habit of binaries that Maria’s situation collapses.
In Tavakolian's series May your wish come true, the veil and chador are re-presented as powerful and haunting symbols of women's agency and choice. In these images, Tavakolian takes full-body portraits of women participating in Moharram, a commemoration period for the 3rd imam in Shii' tradition. During the height of the celebrations, women are forbidden to speak until they visit 40 houses and in each light a candle to Imam Hussein. As the women traverse the streets to perform their visits, they are fully chadored. The first image is of three women in full-length black chadors, with red bands of Persian script around the tops of their heads. Only their hands are visible. The second image, of a woman alone, displays nothing but her face, and barely visible under a lace face-covering as she stands against a graffiti-covered city wall. Here Tavakolian playfully juxtaposes a stereotype of the modern urban (graffiti) and a stereotype of the backward non-urban (woman in chador); however, like the woman barely visible through the lace of her niqab (face-veil), it is clear there is a deeper story underneath the stereotypes. Another image in the series shows a woman chadored with a child next to her, pulling on her sleeve: the child’s veil is brightly patterned and orange, a splash of vibrant color and movement next to her mother’s silent, unmoving form. The fourth image in the series is particularly jolting: a woman with a blue headscarf stands with her face close to the camera, a colorful flag decorated with emblems behind her. The very top of her forehead and hairline are visible, but her face is covered by a thin, tightly stretched black cloth that reveals the ghost-like outline of her eyes, nose and mouth. The photograph is unsettling as it hints at her humanity, personality, and likeness but does not satisfy the viewer looking for her face; the viewer is left unsatisfied, wanting more. The final image in the series is of a woman in a full flowing black chador, with a ghastly neon green gauze face cover. The green face veil is ghastly in being opposite of normal hue for a human face. In these images, the women possess full control over their image, refusing to give in to the pressure of the viewer. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod notes, women “decide for whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.”[1] In this construction, the veiled women demonstrate agency, choice, and power in controlling the gaze of others. The women in the images could see everything while their images were being captured, but the photographer (and subsequently the viewer) is the one with a limited perception. Also, this series is captured in color, despite the muted tones of these women’s clothing that would have lent themselves well to black and white. Perhaps Tavakolian has done this to purposefully underscore the contemporary, alive nature of these images. Further, do viewers read these works differently knowing also that the women are silent as they perform their visits? Rather than affirming that silence implies consent, the women in these images retain all power over their images and voices, whereas the photographer and viewer are kept at a distance.
[1] Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104: 3 (Sept 02): 786.
