Kiana Hayeri – part 1

The old adage that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is never truer than when a photograph takes us into the heart of another culture and tells the story of a person who inhabits a world which is very different from our own.  For me, this is the real power of Kiana Hayeri’s insightful work.  Kiana is, of course, the winner of the Guernsey Photography Festival International Competition 2011.  I was lucky enough to interview this young photographer, who grew up in Iran and moved to Canada in 2005 to pursue her post-secondary education.  In this, the first of two posts about Kiana, the focus is on her cultural background and how this is portrayed in her photographs.

May God be with you, my daughter explores the emotional journeys of Iranian teenage girls as they leave their home country in hope of a better future.  In the following image, Parastou’s mother dozes in bed after receiving a call from the Australian Embassy to say her daughter’s visa has been approved.  Parastou is now in Sydney and Kiana will visit her in January.

It was this project which so impressed the Guernsey Photography Festival judging panel.  Judge John O’Neill of OPA elaborates:  ‘The glimpses into a family story telling that of a new life, the making of friends and the sheer beauty that comes with the liberation at the end of this series made Kiana’s work a clear and well-deserved winner of the 2011 prize.’

Kiana’s ongoing project, Your veil is a battleground, tackles the dichotomy between how Iranian youths are expected to conduct themselves and their desire to push these boundaries.  Kiana explains:  ‘In Iran, there are a lot of restrictions about how you dress and how you interact with the opposite sex.  I started following these girls who are always trying to push their head scarves back a little bit, or put on a bit more makeup.  The whole summer I was in Iran, I was working on this project.  For me, it was very nerve-racking.  Morality police were marching through the streets, but the girls were pretty relaxed.  They’re always risking being fined, being detained for a day or two, or sometimes even being lashed.’

Kiana uses her photography to tell stories, her own and others who need their stories to be told.  ‘Obviously Iran and its culture have played a big role in who I am or where I am right now and it is somehow reflected in the work that I do,’ she says.  I asked Kiana whether she felt that people’s perception of Iran was wrong, and therefore felt a need to set the record straight:  ‘Yes, there are a lot of false concepts about Iran and Iranians.  Most images that came out of Iran prior to the presidential election in 2009 were pictures of women covered in black chador and men with long beards.  Iran and its culture is much more complex and deeper than what has been portrayed so far.’

In this image, ‘The two men at the doorway are Shayesteh’s brothers.  She argues with her ‘over-protective’ brothers over the outfit she had chosen to wear for her birthday party.’

Kiana sums up the impact of her work beautifully:  ‘I don’t believe that the world can be changed with one photograph, but I do believe as a photographer, I am able to impact individuals. It all happens in small and quiet ways that we don’t always see.’

Next time I’ll be focusing on how Kiana got into photography and looking ahead to her Journey Festival commission, for which she will be travelling to Iran in order to document the daily lives of young girls.
www.kianahayeri.com