Fereshteh Eslahi, Iran
Fereshteh Eslahi completed a master’s degree at the University of Tehran. She has been working for Iranian photo agencies since 2014, has been a member of an Iranian press photographers’ association since 2017, and has also been part of a sports-focused photographers’ agency since 2020. The complexity of human nature, as stated in her self-description, is what moves her in every subject.
In May 2025, the mullah regime’s attempt to tighten the headscarf requirement for women in the country still failed. Then, in October, came the news that in the capital Tehran alone, 80,000 newly recruited “morality police” were to enforce compliance with the Islamic dress code more rigorously. The head of the Authority for the Promotion of Ethical Standards justified this by stating that it was intended to combat “any tendency towards secularism” as well as “social indifference”.
And yet: since the nationwide protests in 2022, since the rise of the women’s movement under the slogan “Women, life, freedom”, more and more Iranian women are refusing to be dictated to about covering their hair with a headscarf or concealing their body contours with long jackets. And this despite persecution and prison sentences. It is an uprising, but one that expresses itself peacefully and has a peaceful demand. Simply the acceptance that women, as women, do not have to hide, that femininity is not to be regarded as a provocation and does not have to be concealed in public – but is nothing other than a self-evident human right.
This desire is courageous nonetheless. And more and more women in Iran, especially the young ones, possess this courage. The dancer on the roof, her leap with arms outstretched, is an expression of hope to be able to free oneself from dictates of all kinds. This scene was captured by the Iranian photographer Fereshteh Eslahi, who studies the everyday lives of Iranian women through her camera. These are often very unspectacular scenes, details, yet they reveal the diversity of behaviour.
And which also quietly illustrate what Eslahi has brought to light in an award-winning photographic project of a completely different nature. In 2021, she won a World Press Photo Award for her long-term documentation of a man who was left paraplegic following a sporting accident, whom doctors no longer believed would ever be able to move anything other than his eyelids. And yet he achieved far more than anyone thought possible. Through perseverance, self-confidence, strength and optimism.
Eslahi also sees this confidence in the women she photographs.
(Laudatio by Peter-Matthias Gaede)