My Iranian identity is revealed with the help of my photographs. Of course, as I was born in Isfahan and have an Iranian father, this affiliation will be forever printed on my identity papers. It is written.
Having left Iran at a very early age and not having any memory of it, I was not able to feel Iranian. That was, until the day I decided to discover this country that was also mine. It was 1996.
Equipped with my French mother’s old passport from the days of the Shah, where I appeared as a chubby-cheeked baby in an identity photo on the fourth page which had written “unknown”, I went to the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Paris, hoping to obtain a visa.
“No need for a visa,” as I was told by a consulate employee, “you’re Iranian!” This first passport with an adult photo ID has been well-used over the course of time, filled with country entry and exit stamps: Tehran, Mehrabad Airport; Tehran, Imam Khomeini Airport; Isfahan, Shahid Beheshti Airport. I stopped counting the trips after the thirty-first one, almost all having a photographic goal. Each of them taught me how to feel more and more Iranian.
At the very beginning during my first steps on the ground of my roots, it was the women of Isfahan who showed me the way. I tried to discover, through them, the woman I could have become if I had grown up in Iran. Observing their little everyday gestures, I learned what it meant to be a spouse, a mother, a housewife, a worker, a citizen.
These shared life moments are, for me, telling moments, photographic memories that had been erased from my memory and that I reconstructed over the years.
Now twenty years later, I can say that I found “my Iranianity”, or even “my Isfahanity”. I am not going to omit my French identity. It was always there. I don’t need to go search for it.
The French part of me constantly watches the Iranian part of me, and vice-versa.
Isabelle Eshraghi
Isabelle Eshraghi, Back to my roots
Isabelle Eshraghi is represented by Agence VU
