Newsha Tavakolian: Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album exhibition at Dubai's East Wing

“The family photo album is the showcase for my generation. The yellowed albums and pictures of smiling children dressed up in their best clothes are testament to our hopes and dreams, but they end in blank pages and the moment when our parents stopped taking our pictures (…)

For me Iran is the country where I was born, I went to school here, started my career, and never left. As a photographer I have always struggled with how to perceive my society, with all its complexities and misunderstandings. For this project, I have decided to continue producing the photo albums of my generation. To add the pictures that were never taken of the way that life is for them now, as adults. I followed people who, in a sense, define this generation. They are interchangeable, thus representing many. This photo album is theirs; it is my vision of life in Iran now, unromantic and confined. Those who feature on the pages are interchangeable, placed randomly in the natural situation of what is or could be their daily lives.”

East Wing is proud to present this work by Newsha Tavakolian, the winner of the 5^th Carmingac Photojournalism Award.

A self-taught photographer, Newsha Tavakolian began working professionally in the Iranian press at women’s daily newspaper ‘Zan’ when she was just 16 years old. At 18, Newsha was the youngest photographer to cover the 1999 student uprising, which was a turning point for the country’s blossoming reformist movement and for Newsha personally as a photojournalist; a year later she joined New York based agency Polaris Images.

In 2002 she started working internationally, covering the war in Iraq and has since covered regional conflicts, natural disasters and made social documentary stories. Her work is published internationally in magazines and newspapers including; Time Magazine, Newsweek, Stern, Le Figaro, Colors, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, NRC Handelsblad, The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic.

Newsha covered the Presidential elections in Iran in 2009, which ended in chaos forcing her to temporary halt her work in photojournalism. At that time she began working on new projects comprised that mix social documentary photography and art.

Newsha Tavakoian has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums such as; the Victoria & Albert, the British Museum (UK), LACMA and the Boston Museum of Fine Art (USA). In 2014 Newsha was chosen as the Fifth Laureate of the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. The book, ‘Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album’ accompanies this exhibition and was published by Kehrer Verlag in spring 2015, also a series of videos from the Blank Pages project are currently on display at the 2015 Venice Biennial in Italy.

The exhibition will run at East Wing Gallery, DIFC, Dubai from 2 July to 3 September 2015. For more information about Newsha’s work at the East Wing, visit their official website or her own website.