The big picture: Tehran’s anonymous journalist

In 2017, while working on a story about student protests in Tehran, the Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian hit an obstacle in her reporting. She’d made contact with a number of young people involved in the protests, but after she’d interviewed them and taken their portraits, almost all of them asked to remain anonymous. “They wanted to be photographed from behind or in ways that would hide their identity for security reasons,” says Tavakolian. “As a photographer, eyes are an essential part of my images and the way I connect to people, so I struggled with the idea of completely hiding them.”

This portrait is not of a protester but of a journalist covering the protests, who also asked to have her identity concealed – an indication of just how fraught the act of newsgathering is under the Iranian regime. Tavakolian doesn’t have much information about the journalist beyond her first name, Roya; nor is she certain why the scissors were lying next to her. They lend a sense of menace to the image, as though danger might be lurking just outside the circle of lamplight, though Tavakolian reckons she might simply have been using them to cut out newspaper stories.

The photograph is included in a new book of Tavakolian’s work, And They Laughed At Me – a collection from her archive going back to 1995 of “failed work, crooked, out of focus snapshots that I had long ago mentally thrown away”. For the student protest images, Tavakolian began experimenting with covering faces using materials she had around her, including coloured stickers. “I remember feeling an urge to interrupt the surface itself, so I began scratching into the stickers almost unconsciously, creating small ruptures, traces of what could not be completely erased.”

However much she concealed the identities of her subjects, something essential about them shone through. “Beneath those layers there was still a presence that refused to disappear,” she says. “The eyes carried a quiet intensity, a kind of resistance that could not be fully covered.”

Newsha Tavakolian: And They Laughed At Me is published by Kehrer Verlag