DOCUMENT: SECOND GENERATION IRANIAN-AMERICANS IN LOS ANGELES
From October 2009 until January 2010, anthropologist and PHD student, Amy Malek asked four photographers – Farhad Parsa, Arash Saedinia, Parisa Taghizadeh and Ramin Talaie – to focus their lenses on second generation Iranian-American in Los Angeles, home to the world’s largest population of expatriate Iranians. The result was an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum from June to Sept 2010.
“In 1999, I co-wrote and directed a film called BUT YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH, which asked a small group of London-based Iranians questions about cultural identity. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, I was astounded by the number and diversity of Iranians living there. The younger/second generation had an identity that was unique and different to the one I had grown up with in London. This brought about the same questions I had been asking for years, both of myself and of other Iranians. Who are we? If there is a “we” at all, and is it defined by a sense of national and cultural unity? In DOCUMENT, I continued the same line of enquiry; of what it means to be Iranian. Is one’s sense of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ defined by one’s heritage? One’s nationality? One’s birthplace? One’s notion of home? “
Parisa Taghizadeh
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