Shadi Ghadirian was born in 1974 in Iran. She is a photographer who lives and works in Iran. Ghadirian studied photography at Azad University. After finishing her B. A., Ghadirian began her professional career as a photographer. She says that "quite by accident", the subjects of her first two series were "women".After finishing college, Ghadirian was inspired to make work reflecting what she saw as the duality and contradiction of life.Her Qajar Series (1998-2001) consists of small studio portraits of women dressed in the nineteenth-century Qajar style. Many of the women that were photographed are friends and family of Ghadirian. The backgrounds of these portraits resemble those found in photographic studios of that period. However the artist has added some modern anomalies or dissonances, such as a mountain bike or a Pepsi-Cola can. Ghadirian plays with these juxtapositions and contrasts, this expressing the difficulties women face in Iran today; torn between tradition and the modernity of globalization. These composed portraits depict women unsure to which era they belong.
