Mahboube Karamli, PlayTime

When I started teaching at school, I was only 23. So, you can imagine how the little age gap between my students and me helped me to be a part of their world. However, as I continued working there and of course grew older I could see the age difference is creating a transformation in our relationship.

Mahboube Karamli

Every single year, I could see my students in edge of two worlds, a girl as a teenager and a girl as an adult. From this recognition the idea of photographing my students between 16 to 18 at school environment emerged, the place where they spend at least eight hours a day.

Once that I wanted to show the students how a medium-format camera worked, I took a photo of one, braiding her friend’s hair. It made them extremely excited. All of a sudden, they wanted to be in front of my camera, as a subject. The noise of closing the mirror and shutter made them absolutely thrilled. They even wanted to be the one who pushes the shutter release.

It was then that I decided to continue our Shooting sessions in their break time. It was like a game for us. While I was teaching them how to use a medium-format camera, I was also shooting for my own project. They were interested in learning but sometimes they were worried about their next class. I could see the sense of paradox in them and it was exactly what I desired to depict. I also tried to make the scenes empty, by removing thedetails as far as I could because their characters in my frames were more important. I wanted to shoot a particular moment that I could observe in my students’ lives.

Mahboube Karamli (b. 1985, Tehran) is a photographer and educator whose work explores the visibility, identity, and transformation of women in both private and public spaces. With a documentary approach rooted in long-term engagement, she captures intimate portraits that reflect the personal and social transitions of her subjects.
She holds a BA in Photography from Azad University (Tehran, 2009) and an MA in Photography from the University of Art in Tehran (2021). Since 2009, she has also taught photography at various institutions, including Manzoumeh Kherad Institute and Farzanegan High Schools. Her close engagement with students has significantly shaped her artistic perspective, particularly in her focus on youth, education, and the representation of women.
Her major photographic series trace the evolving relationship between young women and their environments. In Girls, she portrayed teenagers in the intimacy of their bedrooms, centering the bed as a personal and expressive space. Wakefulness expanded this into a visual study of beauty and self-perception among her generation. In HappyVille, she turned her lens to brides in beauty salons in Tehran’s Shadabad neighborhood, capturing moments of vulnerability behind traditional performances of femininity. With End of Class, her attention shifted to primary school children engaging with light and shadow after lessons — a project born from her teaching experience. Playtime followed high school girls navigating the transition to adulthood. Her most recent work revisits these same girls post-graduation, documenting changes in their identities and the evolving nature of her connection with them.
Karamli has exhibited widely in Tehran and internationally in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey, Kuwait, the UAE, and Argentina. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Espace Vital: Femmes Photographes Iraniennes (Thames & Hudson, 2023) and Let Us Believe in the Dawn of Spring: Portraits from Iran (Fotografiska, 2023). She was also featured in the online exhibition “Let Us Believe in the Dawn of Spring,” curated by Anahita Sadighi in 2023.
She lives and works in Tehran.