Gomma Photography Grant 2020
Cast Out of Heaven
Photographer
Hashem Shakeri
Cast Out of Heaven
01 Feb, 2022
Skyrocketing rents and house prices are forcing many Tehraners to leave the capital without any intention of coming back ever again. Under the present circumstances, tenants are looking to move to satellite towns to cut down on accommodation costs. The Mehr Project initiated in 2007, What followed was rapid urban population growth and the construction of new towns. However, sucient measures were not taken to ensure healthy living conditions for those who came to inhabit these new towns. Suering critical shortcomings are Parand, Pardis and Hashtgerd, three newly-constructed towns on the margins of Tehran. These are huge islands of soaring skyscrapers and indiscriminately developed apartments lled with crowds of people and cars. They begin but seem to have no end. Besides the huge population of Tehraners, people from all over Iran are migrating to these new towns. These are notorious for social pathologies, like high rates of suicide among pupils and drug abuse. Here is the land of those cast out of their heaven–the metropolitan Tehran. And they all share the bitterness of the fall. Yet, every single weekday of their remaining desperate life, they get up early at dawn and set o on an apparently endless trip to work.
About the photographer
Hashem Shakeri
Hashem Shakeri is an artist, photographer and filmmaker who lives in Tehran. He began practicing photography in 2006 and started a professional career in documentary photography in 2010. Since then he has been working as a freelance photographer on arrange of commissions and private projects in Iran, Turkey, South Korea, Malaysia, France, Denmark and Germany. One of his major concerns is the psychological investigation of human relationships in the con- temporary world. By capturing restlessness, perplexity and social struggle in the modern capitalist world, He records the optical unconsciousness of the society and provides a universal narrative form with a personal insight. He has been involved in many national and international festivals and received many awards. Among them are the Ian Parry Scholarship 2015, the Lucas Dolega Award 2016 and the POYi's World Understanding Award in 2017, and the Lens Culture’s Emerging Talents Award for 2018, Getty Images Reportage Grant 2019, LOBA 2020. He has held various exhibitions around the world, being shown in many museums, festivals and biennales such as Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, Paris Photo, Cortona on the move, visa pour l’image, Lumix photo festival and others. His works have been featured in numerous publications around the world such as Sunday Times, British Journal of Photography, New York Times, The New Yorker, Paris Match, Aperture, Reporters Without Borders, Courrier International, Natgeo, Spiegel and others.
