Hashem Shakeri has captured a lost paradise outside Tehran

12 months ago

With the series Cast Out of Heaven, Iranian photographer Hashem Shakeri turns his gaze to a reality many prefer to ignore: the satellite cities that sprang up around Tehran as a response to the housing emergency, which have now become symbols of a paradise that never materialized. Places conceived as accessible refuges that instead reveal themselves as zones of confinement, suspended between the illusion of progress and the bitter recognition of a precarious existence.

His photographs depict residential towers rising out of emptiness, endless roads that seem to lead nowhere, neighborhoods that have yet to find a real life. Around them, the vastness of Iran’s desert landscape makes these architectures even more spectral, like artificial islands in the void. And yet, in that absence of human warmth, Shakeri manages to find a strange, magnetic beauty.

At the root of it all lie corruption, neoliberal economic policies, international sanctions, and a currency in free fall. In this context, the Mehr Housing Project — the largest state-funded housing project, launched in 2007 — has turned the idea of affordable housing into a dystopia. The cities of Parand, Pardis, and Hashtgerd, created to ease pressure on Tehran, now host hundreds of thousands of people deprived of essential services: schools, hospitals, transport. Commuters face two- or three-hour journeys each day to reach the capital, while unemployment, addiction, and social malaise spread inexorably.

In these new cities, the promise of a better future has shattered against an everyday life made up of alienation and sacrifice. It is no coincidence that Shakeri speaks of a people “cast out of their own paradise”: the citizens of Tehran, pushed away from their roots and forced to live in places that seem to exist only halfway.

Cast Out of Heaven is not a standalone project, but part of a trilogy through which Shakeri explores three central social issues of contemporary Iran: exile, isolation, and self-alienation. His work thus yields images that function as visual metaphors for an entire existential condition.