Rana Javadi

Rana Javadi (b. 1953, Tehran) is a self-taught photographer and one of the leading figures in the promotion of photography in Iran, both as an artist and as an advocate for the medium.

She first came to prominence documenting the 1979 Iranian revolution, producing some of the most memorable images of the period. Her later work draws on images and objects from across history, which she combines into layered photographic collages. In the series When You Were Dying (2008), she overlaid 20th-century portraits from the studio of the acclaimed Iranian photographer Bahram Chehrenegar with dried flowers, fabrics and other traces of contemporary life. “By creating this new layered picture, the present moment dies too, but in a way that starts another life in a new form,” she has said of the series.

Alongside her artistic practice, Javadi has served since 1989 as Director of Photo and Pictorial Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran, a non-profit research, consulting and publishing organization. From 1997 to 1999 she was director and a founding member of Akskhaneh Shahr, Iran’s first museum devoted exclusively to photography. Since 1999 she has been director and a founding member of the editorial board of Aksnameh, a quarterly photography journal.

For decades she worked closely with her husband, the photographer Bahman Jalali (1944–2010). Their joint retrospective, Living in Two Times, was presented at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., in 2022–2023. Her work has been exhibited in Tehran, Paris, Boston, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, London, Dubai and Berlin, and is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.