Shadi Ghadirian

'Being a woman in Iran is hard, and working as a woman photographer is even harder' - Shadi Ghadirian. Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran's leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she has exhibited widely in Europe and the US, and her work has been collected by museums worldwide. She came to the limelight in the late 90s with her Qajar series, in which she examines the paradoxical position of women in Iran. Women in traditional clothing pose with items such as a mountain bike - permitted a hundred years ago, and now forbidden to women. Ghadirian's oeuvre is a spirited wink at authority. With witty parodies of domesticity, she neatly sidesteps both restrictions and expectations.