Amak Mahmoodian's Shenasnameh is made up of a series of pictures of Iranian women taken from their shenasnameh: Iran's domestic identity certificate. Through these photographs, Mahmoodian tells us both the story of the women who feature in her book, and the ways in which photography functions at the official, personal and social level. It's a book of personal identities, mixed with official identities of fingerprints and photographs rejected due to an 'excess' of make-up or hair. 

The project started when Mahmoodian and her mother were having their shenasnameh pictures renewed. 'The idea came to me immediately,' the artist explains. ‘The same day I started asking my neighbours if I could borrow their shenasnameh photographs.' 

As Mahmoodian collected the photographs (and accompanying fingerprints) she noticed how, despite the compulsory chador and the absence of non-facial features in the photographs, the women look so different to each other. Sometimes photographs were sent to her by people she had never met. For these images, Mahmoodian would travel to meet the women and collect their fingerprints.

The women’s eyes stare out of the page at you and the viewer imagines who these women are; there is tenderness, defiance, anger, questioning, humour, and love in these images. Turn the pages, however, and another side of the book emerges when you see the images Mahmoodian collected that were photographs rejected by shenasnameh bureaucrats.

Elements deemed unsuitable are scrawled out with thick pen; hair that is showing, too much mascara, too much lipstick, too much attitude? This is censorship, not just of the way the women look, but of the way women are. There is violence and misogyny in these brush strokes that seems to be more than just a projection of the viewer. The cutting pen strokes across the eyes, the erasure of the lips, the almost complete destruction of the entire face through a pen make for images where the women have been blinded and made mute.

But the censorship doesn't just come from the state, it also comes from Iranian women, and this is something Mahmoodian acknowledges. One image is shown torn in half. Mahmoodian found this on a Tehran street, the remnant of a photograph a woman tore so it could not be re-used for a fake Facebook profile or as a 'girlfriend'. Another shows a cut-out of a photograph of somebody who initially agreed to be included in the project but then later backed out. Only her shadow remains.

The last layer of censorship comes from Mahmoodian herself. 'Sometimes I find it very difficult to express myself simply because I am a woman and I am Iranian and because of that it is impossible to talk about my feelings because I will be criticised by both sides; by people in the West and by people in Iran,' she says.

The artist reflects: 'When I see these faces, I feel love. And as I look, the stories of their lives come to my mind, the houses where I chatted and drank tea with them. So for me, the message of the book is confidence, power, beauty and love! But for other people, especially for Western people, I want to tell them to see Persian women as they are, as something more than just the cover because they are so much more than that and they have their personality and each of them is herself. This is a book about who women are. That's the message of the book for everybody.' 

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Colin Pantall about Amak Mahmoodian’s project Shenasnameh, originally published in Foam Magazine 46, Who We Are, in 2017.

AMAK MAHMOODIAN (b.1980, Shiraz, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She began her career as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003. Since 2010, she has been living in the UK, unable to return to Iran. She practices as a visual artist at the intersection of conceptual image-making and documentary photography, working with photographs, text, video, drawing, archives and sound. Her practice explores the presentation of gender, identity and displacement, bridging a space between personal and political across platforms and formats including installation, books and films. Mahmoodian’s work has been shown internationally, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fototeca Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires; Rencontres d’Arles, Arles; and Peckham 24, London. Her works are held in collections such as the Tate, and the British Library in London. She has published two books, Shenasnameh (RRB- ICV Lab, 2016), and Zanjir (RRB, 2019) which was the winner of The Best Photo Text Book award at Rencontres Arles, 2020. Her work appears in key titles on photography such as Photography – A Feminist History (Tate Publishing, 2021) and How We See: Photobooks by Women (10x10 Photobooks, 2019).

COLIN PANTALL is a writer, photographer, blogger and senior lecturer on the Documentary Photography course from the University of Waltes, Newport. He has written a number of leading publications on an impressive range of themes, from the environment to politics. He is a contributing writer to the British Journal of Photography and also writes for Magnum Photos. His publications include his book All Quiet on the Home Front (2018) and Brexit Pictures (2020).

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