Cecilia’s last memory, before she was arrested, «she is in front of her hotel: I told her ‘I hope to see you again soon in Tehran’ but now I know that it will no longer be like this and this is very sad even if today there is only room for happiness». Maryam Rahmanian, Iranian freelance photographer who worked with Cecilia Sala on the latest reports from Tehran for Choramedia, today says she is “over the moon”, happy for Cecilia, colleague and friend, and for her family.
«I hope she never has to relive what she experienced here again – says the photojournalist – She loves Iran, I greeted her by telling her that I hoped to see her again soon and I was sure of it because she has a special relationship with Tehran but now I am sure that she will never return . This pains me and it saddens me that this ugly incident happened to you, who loves Iran.”
He shared the latest reports with Maryam Cecilia. Just the last one, almost an omen, up Zeinab Mousavithe most famous stand up comedian in Iran, a woman who practices irreverent and unconventional comedy in a country where it is already difficult just to be a woman. Zeinab is on trial after being arrested and then released precisely for a joke, for her comedy but she still wanted to meet Cecilia to talk to her about the days in which she was detained in solitary confinement: days which she defined «funny», because «everything can be funny».
Then many other shots for reports on daily life in Tehran: boys and girls like many others, colored hair sprouting from chadorsafternoons at the park with the dogs, in a café, in a museum. The desire to also seek normality in the repetitiveness of common gestures. Gettyimages also commissioned her to do a reportage during Covid, here where vaccines are slow to arrive and everything is faced for a long time with masks, isolation and short trips to the Caspian Sea. Everyday life is a bit characteristic of Maryam, studies in America but life and career in Iran: in his shots life in a difficult country, the cultural diversity between generations, the even more evident tension here between future and past. A tension that she also experienced in her professional career working as a news and reportage photographer, a field, in her country, unusual for a woman. Perhaps this is why the harmony with Cecilia Sala, that work together which he now remembers as “extraordinary”. And the hope of one day meeting again in Tehran.
