I was excited to explore Kyotographie, the sprawling annual international photography festival in Kyoto. Now in its 12th year, it has become one of Asia’s largest photography festivals. It features 13 curated main exhibitions and more than 100 KG+, KG Select, and Special exhibitions installed in venues large and small all over Kyoto. 

As far as I know, there is nothing like it in NYC. We have the annual AIPAD show, but it primarily consists of works selected by participating galleries, which must rent their booths and sell the works they display to justify the high cost of attending. While some participating galleries are more curatorially- or mission-driven than others, the photographs on view are mostly selected for their commercial appeal rather than for purely social or aesthetic impact.

Kyotographie is refreshingly different and much more inspiring! “We always aim to highlight the richness of both local and international talent. By highlighting many regions and people we can offer a dynamic and inclusive festival which connects and elevates everyone,” say festival founders/organizers/life partners Lucille Reyboz, a photographer from France, and Yusuke Nakanishi, a Japanese lighting artist.

One of the exhibitions I was most keen to visit was “You Don’t Die — The Story of Yet Another Iranian Uprising,” an exhibition at Sfera culled from 1000s of mostly anonymous images of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising inside Iran, collected and authenticated by Le Monde photo editor Marie Sumalla and Le Monde journalist Ghazal Golshiri. With the assistance of Iranian colleagues Payam Elhami and Farzad Seifikaran, they established the date and location of each photo. Photographs by several professional Iranian photographers inside Iran also appeared in the exhibition.

As a feminist and a Sufi Dance Artist with teachers and friends from and inside Iran, I had a strong personal interest in the uprising and in this show. During the pandemic, one of my Iranian-born staff members at CRS was forced by circumstances to return to Iran, and communication with her became more difficult after Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old young woman from Saqqez, in Kurdistan, western Iran, was arrested on September 13, 2022 by the “morality” police (Gasht-e Ershad) while visiting Tehran with her brother because a single strand of her hair had come loose from under her headscarf. Mahsa was loaded into a police van and severely beaten, dying in police custody at the hospital three days later.

At Mahsa’s funeral, a plain block of concrete was placed on her grave, on which her uncle painted the words (translated into English here):  “Dear Jina, you donʼt die, your name becomes a symbol.” Images of the gravestone bearing these words were posted on social media — the first known of which appears in this exhibition — and resonated with young women all across Iran, who were fed up with having to live with the sexist restrictions and capricious violence inflicted upon them by the government and who understood that what had happened to Mahsa, through no fault of her own, could easily happen to any of them at any time. 

From that point onward, more and more women inside Iran, at first young women and then joined by women of all ages and social classes, started to walk outside without their headscarves, and even men began accompanying them in solidarity, sparking what became known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom!” movement. 

Images of the protests and the violent police crackdowns, as well as images created in support of the movement, filled social media, rapidly amplifying and spreading the messaging. The number of people joining in the protests quickly swelled. Within days, the Iranian government began restricting access to social media. Nevertheless, people still found ways to share many images of these courageous protesters and the vicious crackdown they endured, and coverage of the uprising spread around the world, inspiring numerous protests and events in solidarity. This exhibition seeks to reflect the breadth and spirit of what has been, in the curators’ words, “the most powerful wave of protest in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established in 1979.”

In the photo below, posted without photo attribution on October 26, 2022, the 40th day after Mahsa Amini’s death, we see a young woman without a hijab standing on a vehicle while a huge crowd of people pass by her to visit the Aychi cemetery in Saqqez, Mahsa’s hometown in Iranian Kurdistan, where Mahsa is buried. The crowd is traveling there to commemorate that anniversary, which is known as the time when the soul passes to the afterlife. Did the anonymous woman know she was being photographed? Was the photo planned? Or did someone simply catch a spontaneous moment? It seems to me that it doesn’t really matter. Either way, the woman risked her life to express her solidarity. Either way, the image is authentic and powerful.

The crowd’s presence indicates the wide support for Mahsa. So does the fact that no one is trying to harass or arrest the woman whose hair is uncovered. Still, she is taking a risk. If she had been photographed from the front and the authorities had obtained the photo, she might have been identified and punished later. And maybe she was…but she wasn’t going to be stopped. 

The freedom and power of the photo is undeniable. It calls to mind the iconic Adbusters poster of the ballerina atop the Wall St. bull statue that kicked off the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and the even more indelible image orchestrated by the Yes Men of the man dressed as a matador who poses atop a police car taunting the bull in the middle of the OWS demonstrations while the police, backs to him, are distracted by two men dressed as clowns. All three of these images use a single figure standing tall to convey freedom and symbolize the collective spirit of an entire movement. But the image from Iran is the most compelling of the three because only the woman in the Iranian image is risking her life to express herself and because she is claiming something beyond policies or politics, the fundamental right to freedom. And I think the many women inside Iran who saw this image and others showing women uncovered in public could not only relate but could imagine what it must feel like to feel the wind at last in their hair. These images activated the long-repressed longing to experience the same freedom and emboldened women throughout Iran to claim it.

On December 31, 2022, the professional photographer Elham Abbasloo photographed herself with not only an uncovered but shaved head, lying curled upon a bed of clippings of hair that many other women had given her, illustrating another form of rebellion that has become common inside Iran. A woman’s hair has long been considered an important symbol of beauty. The requirement to cover it has come and gone throughout Iran’s Shia history, and the tradition of cutting one’s hair as a form of protest and/or mourning can be traced back at least to the Persian epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, written between c. 977 and 1010 CE. But the act also references and inverts the Old Testament story of Delilah cutting Samson’s hair to disempower him. Women, by cutting their own hair, are claiming their power. 

The exhibition, which I also attended, opened on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2023, harkening back to the March 8, 1979, protest by thousands of women inside Iran in response to the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement that women should wear the hijab in public.

The exhibition notes state that “#WomanLifeFreedom movement is inspiring. It is universal. Hair is an essential element for ignition. A strand (wick), can be extinguished if neglected, or can ignite a fire. We hope this exhibition ignites our collective communities as we #StrandForWomen.”