TEHRAN – Works by four Iranians are on display at the La Gacilly Photo Festival, a vast international outdoor exhibition, which is organized every year in the northwestern French city.

Collections by Maryam Firuzi, Gohar Dashti, Ebrahim Noruzi, Hashem Shakeri and photographers from across the world will be on view at the festival, which will be running until September 30.

Firuzi is attending the festival with photos from her series “Persian Identities”. One photo from the collection decorates the homepage of the festival.

“In my opinion, all artistic media are intertwined,” she previously said in an interview with Paris Photo, when the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran showcased her work. 

“All of these art forms influence my photography in different ways; calligraphy taught me discipline and self-dedication, painting taught me freedom of expression, and literature taught me how to develop ideas and articulate them.”

Women take center stage in her works, which explore her world, namely present-day Iran, in which the place of women is inevitably complex.

Works from different series by Dashti are on display in a collection named “Fragments of Memories”.

Born in Iran near the border with Iraq, 42-year-old Dashti represents elements of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war in her works.

“This conflict had a strong symbolic influence on the emotional life of my generation,” she said. 

In her series “Today’s Life and War”, Dashti captures moments illustrating a duality: that of life going on despite the ravages of war. 

“In a fictional battlefield, I show a couple in their daily lives: they represent the power of perseverance, determination and survival,” she noted.

Noruzi’s photos are on view under the title of “Deceptive Daydreams”.

Winner of several World Press Photo Awards, Noruzi is an established journalist and a staunch defender of the environment.

Two series by Noruzi are on view at La Gacilly, demonstrating a photographic style that could be described as a reverie on the ravages of global warming. 

The first takes us to Lake Urmia, one of the largest salt lakes in the world, which is in danger of disappearing in the near future. 

The second series looks at the relationship between people and water resources in his country.

Shakeri is exhibiting his photos in a collection named “Sandy Landscapes”. Most of the pictures are from one of his series, which features the new satellite cities emerging from the desert to house Iranians forced to leave Tehran because of the soaring price of land and increasingly difficult living conditions.

Created in 2004, the La Gacilly Photo Festival offers its annual visitors an immersive and strolling experience in the heart of some thirty open-air galleries and in large format, presenting the best of contemporary photo creation in a permanent concern for high artistic standards.

The canvases, sometimes around 70 square meters, adorn the streets, gardens and alleys of La Gacilly, transforming it into a “Village in Images”.

Photo: A photo from Iranian photographer Ebrahim Noruzi’s series “Deceptive Daydreams” on view at the La Gacilly Photo Festival, France.

MMS/YAW