Thread by @DrAlakbarov

Thread. I like to cover photographers from the world's less known areas.

So I would like to pay my tribute to Shirin Aliabadi, an Iranian artist known for her colorful portraits of young women breaking the stereotypes associated with the country’s strict moral and dress codes.

These striking photos from her series known as "Miss Hybrid".

Taken from a series of the same name made in 2007, which captures the fashion-and nose-job obsessed young women Aliabadi encountered on the streets of north Tehran.

The are many photos of Iranian women on offer in the West, but not often ones quite like this.

Sadly, the international news media primarily uses photos of women swallowed by coal-black chadors, who'd be impossible to tell apart were it not for the thin slivers of their faces.

Even filmmakers and contemporary artists tend to serve up images of exoticised females, veiled and gowned and imbued with silent suffering, frequently shot in gritty black-and-white.

So I like how Aliabadi took a different stance and "went against the wave."

I also like Aliabadi’s Girls in Cars (2005), where the artist recorded the urban phenomenon of nocturnal cruising in cars as a pastime of young Tehranis.

Restricted in their interactions with the opposite sex in the public space, the middle-class youth used their cars to engage in a vehicular dance fueled by cheap petrol, causing huge traffic jams in the streets in the north of Tehran. 2005 © Shirin Aliabadi

In an interview with Deutsche Bank’s ArtMag, Aliabadi recalled her time capturing the images of young women all dressed up to be seen through the windows of their cars “as the best time I ever had stuck in traffic.”

Sadly, three years ago Shirin Aliabadi died in her native Tehran.

However, I'm pretty sure in upcoming years her work will be getting more attention. #WomensArt