About the Photographer
Rasti, Laurence
Swiss, b. 1990
In 2007, the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia University in which he stated, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” His words echo in the title of Laurence Rasti’s series Il n’y a pas d’homosexuels en Iran (There are no Homosexuals in Iran). Homosexuality does indeed exist in Iran, even if consensual relations between members of the same sex are punishable by death. Rasti captures sensitive portraits of gay Iranian refugees in the Turkish town of Denizli, through which they often travel as they exit their home country. Rasti obscures the faces of her subjects who prefer to remain anonymous, a reminder that their lives have been under threat.
