The photographer sentenced to 74 lashes by Iran

Tahmineh Monzavi knows the rules. Do nothing to expose the abhorrence of the Iranian autocracy; no scenes of violence on the streets, no weeping mothers or damaged bodies and definitely no Revolutionary Guards wielding guns and batons

Those are red lines which circumvent her work as a photographer in Tehran. As she says: “A woman on the street with a camera is suspicious. The camera and photography mean espionage.”

But recently she crossed those lines. Or at least the authorities decided she had.

For the offence of taking photographs, she was detained, given a two-year travel ban, a two-year restriction on “artistic activity” and sentenced to be viciously flogged with 74 lashes. Carried out with a three-foot whip, the pain is so severe that victims often faint after seven or eight strokes.

To make her suffering even more intolerable, Monzavi has an autoimmune disease, which despite medication and therapy leaves her in constant pain, mental and physical.

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Her crime: filming a woman in a black dress, her hair unrestrained by a hijab, singing in what appears to be a nightclub.

The picture was one of a set which accompanied her recent exhibition at Photo London, and I asked how it was possible for the singer to perform with such apparent lack of inhibition in Iran’s repressive climate. What was going on?

Image: Tahmineh Monzavi

“Just a film of someone making a YouTube video,” she said dismissively, and we moved on. That was late May. A few days later, in June, she was arrested.

The singer was Parastoo Ahmadi, well known in Iranian dissident circles, who sings passionately of freedom and resistance. The setting was not in a nightclub but in the archways and rough adobe walls of an ancient caravanserai (a roadside inn) some 100 miles south of Tehran.

The filming took place in December 2024, and the singer was briefly detained and charged then. It was not until this month that she and the production team, along with Monzavi, were accused of “offending public decency” and the publication of vulgar and immoral “content online” and punished so brutally. Ahmadi has also been sentenced to 74 lashes.

There was a legal wrangle over the definition of the word vulgarity. The lawyer felt it necessary to read out the definition from a dictionary to offer some clarity. “It was so absurd,” wrote a contemptuous Monzavi to friends, “It was that simple, that complicated and that meaningless.”

It comes as a shock to realise that when we spoke, she must already have known that she was in the sights of the police, yet chose not to discuss her fears. I have not been able to speak to her since her detention.

Perhaps that’s not surprising given the repression artists endure in her country. According to Iran Human Rights Monitor, the January 2026 uprising in which an estimated 42,000 protesters were killed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) saw at least 21 artists also die. In 2022, more than 100 artists were charged with offences such as “propaganda against the system”; many were tortured.

It is routine for Iran’s security forces to come knocking on the door or make phone calls warning citizens they face arrest if they cross the official red lines which dictate what they are allowed to paint, photograph, talk about or sing.

No wonder Monzavi is careful to talk about her own situation – understandable, given that in 2012 she was arrested and imprisoned for her radical work among prostitutes and trans people. The trauma was so intense that she gave up work for two years, and as she says: “I lost my courage as a documentary photographer.”

But when we spoke, the 38-year-old had recovered her spirit as she demonstrated with the latest collection, Iran, Touching at the Body’s Darkness, in which she portrays young people hanging out in Tehran, checking their phones, roller blading, sitting and smoking, meeting friends in their favourite cafe. It could be somewhere cool in East London, Hackney perhaps – Mozavi used to frequent it on her visits to the UK, drawn by the community of media types and artists.

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At first glance, the people she photographed seem as untroubled and everyday as the friends she made in the hipster capital. Life goes on, whether it is the 15-year-old staring intently at the camera, dog in her arms, or a group checking a newsflash about Trump on their phones. Couples perch on motorbikes, two young women, drinks in hand, stand in the Great Square of Isfahan. One poses boldly in an alleyway, cigarette brandished like a dagger, blood red nails matching her lipstick, while a fearsome dude in leather rather sweetly holds hands with his girlfriend.

Only one shows any hint of gaiety, a woman in a shawl dancing exuberantly among the caves of an island in the Straits of Hormuz. Take that, President Trump.

Image: Tahmineh Monzavi

But she is an exception. Look at the eyes of most of the people Monzavi photographs. They are wary, suspicious, defiant.

“It’s not easy to take photographs in the streets because sometimes people, not just the authorities, feel the camera is an enemy,” she told me. “This is a time of suspicion and fear. People see me and think, ‘why are you with a camera? Whose side are you on?’”

And in a memorable phrase, she says, “I stand afar like a thief with my camera.”

It took time for her to win their trust, talking about anything and everything, art, social issues, politics, about their predicament, until they became used to her camera.

“Sometimes they search my name in the internet to find out if I’m taking photos for some other reason.”

Once convinced, they agree to have their picture taken but no one with a greater air of defiance than a young woman with dyed blonde hair, lip piercing and a riot of tattoos.

Like all the women pictured, she is not wearing a hijab, that symbol of oppression which led to the arrest of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s “morality police” in September 2022 for not wearing a headscarf in public places, and whose death in jail sparked the riots of that December.