Paradoxical Iran

Ali Nadjian & Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh

Ali Nadjian and Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh have individual photography practices, but it is in their co-created series We Live in a Paradoxical Society that they really excel. Alone, each of the Iranian photographers have dark and moody, staged images, and at times have seemingly both used the same panoramic camera - or at least presented their images in the same long horizontal proportion.

Somehow, in coming together on We Live in a Paradoxical Society, the images become more successful, more mysterious and give just enough away to make you look longer and think more about what is happening with and to the characters in the series.

Created to illustrate the duality between home life and public life in Iran, Nadjian and Manouchehrzadeh explain in the series on Tehran photo gallery website Silk Road Photo.

"Through these images, we aim to illustrate the output of this dual life in a constructed atmosphere which leads to fear and indifference. This collection has a narrative inside which is the result of our thoughts and necessarily there is no rule that sub narratives are happening in each image of it; meaning that no boundary can be marked between reality and imagination, or between a documentary image and a subjective one."

Ali Nadjian & Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh