When the Iranian Maryam Majd stands in the stadium and photographs women playing soccer, she not only shows the sport – but also honors the oppressed and risks repression herself.
Frankfurt – There are sentences that have rarely come from her lips recently. “I’m fine. I’m really happy here.” This is what Maryam Majd writes from Navi Mumbai, a megacity planned on the drawing board in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The 34-year-old spends most of the days there alone in a room. But she has work to do and she has a mission.
On the Indian west coast, not only are the Asian champions in women’s football being determined, but also up to seven teams taking part in the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. The favorites Japan and China advanced to the semi-finals last Sunday. On the sidelines, Maryam Majd kept pressing the shutter button on her camera, her hands shaking and her eyes shining. For the only officially accredited photographer from Iran, the mere presence at this official tournament under the auspices of the world football association Fifa was a victory.
For many years, Maryam Majd has devoted herself to a task that goes far beyond football. She almost sacrifices her life to give oppressed female athletes a face.
There had been no women’s national team in Iran for almost two years
She arrived in India on Thursday last week. Her journey took two days to get from her hometown of Tehran to Navi Mumbai via Dubai. Through a friend in India, she found a cheap hotel near the stadium that costs less than $30 a night. Away from the stadium and hotel, she doesn’t see much there until the final on Sunday. Deliberately, she says: “I don’t go anywhere else because the corona situation in India is terrible. If my PCR test were positive, I would have to be in quarantine for eight days and lose everything. So I have to be careful.”
Otherwise Maryam Majd would not be able to take pictures. And don’t transport any messages. Because that’s what drove her on this lavish trip. For the business visa to India alone, she had to pay the equivalent of 280 dollars – four times as much as a tourist visa. For her, that’s a fortune.
The extent to which Corona has this event in its grip was shown by the fact that host India had to pull their team out of the tournament right after the opening game – a goalless draw against Iran – due to a corona outbreak. A mood killer. It was also bitter for the brave soccer players from Iran, whose first sense of achievement was denied. Incidentally, they were the only team to wear hijab headscarves, long-sleeved jerseys and long underpants in order to show as little skin as possible and to comply with the strict Islamic requirements from home.
The fact that “Team Melli Baanovaan” qualified for the final round of the Asian Cup for the first time was a sensation – and the arch-conservative clergy did not like it at all. There had been no women’s national team in Iran for almost two years. However, because Fifa has recently demanded support for women’s and girls’ football with reference to the funding and even threatened to suspend the men’s team, the Iranian officials gave up their resistance. Previously in this capacity, Maryam Irandoost was tasked as national coach with finding motivated female footballers across the country – and fought against a lot of resistance.
Women’s football in Iran: Arrested and detained at the airport
Maryam Majd documented this difficult mission with her pictures and kept in touch with the players and the coach. “I tried to inspire them with my photos and to boost their confidence. Most come from lower social classes, from distant villages. They have families that they are now proud of.” She was a photographer at the pre-qualification in Uzbekistan, but has not been allowed to be with the team since. She is very afraid to talk about the causes. With good reason, as her life story shows.
Shortly before the 2011 Women’s World Cup, Maryam Majd received an invitation from Germany to accompany the tournament with her camera – as the first photographer from Iran with an official Fifa accreditation. But the night she went to the airport, she was arrested and detained. For 33 long days until the tournament was over. What was left was a “deeply depressed and hopeless girl,” she once said. “I remember when I was released from prison and after meeting my family, I went to my room and hugged my camera.” She still doesn’t want to let go of it because the camera is probably the only reliable support to this day in her eventful life.
Maryam Majd comes from an educated, sports-loving family in Tehran. When she was young, there were still many newspapers at home at home, and she noticed that there were hardly any women in sports. Then she started taking pictures herself. Even prison could not take away this inner drive from her.
After she also missed the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada and was denied the trip to the 2018 Men’s World Cup in Russia under dubious circumstances, she managed to get to the Women’s World Cup in France a year later, in summer 2019. She sacrificed all her savings to be in a packed stadium for the finals in Lyon.
It didn’t matter that only one newspaper from her home country bought her pictures, Maryam Majd was overwhelmed by her feelings. On her birthday, she wrote in Persian on Facebook: “I have never given up on my dream of participating in a Women’s World Cup. It felt like everything was finally coming true. I stood behind the window and could see the stadium. I was alone on my birthday – and that night was the best birthday of my life.” Her lengthy post ended almost defiantly, “I made my dream come true despite hearing a thousand times, ‘You can’t! You can not!'”
It’s about strengthening the self-confidence of women in Iran
Of course, she dreams of reporting on the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in a year and a half – only without international orders it could be difficult to refinance the costs.
But Maryam Majd has long since not limited herself to capturing sporting events. Her commitment to women in the Middle East extends to Afghanistan, where she began photographing oppressed women’s sports in 2019 – and has created impressive photo essays from them. “With suicide bombings and the occasional attack, artificial turf pitches, gymnasiums and stadium stands have become safe havens for girls who, panic-stricken, throw themselves at the ball or bang their fists on the punching bag,” she writes of her time in Kabul when still settled NATO helicopters circled over the city.
After the radical Islamic Taliban seized power, some of the footballers fled to Tehran – and Maryam Majd also accompanies their careers. The refugee women are now being trained by Fariba Nemati on the southern outskirts of the capital. The 29-year-old comes from Afghanistan herself and wants to convey to the migrant women that life is not over for them and that they have to keep fighting and ideally also learn martial arts. According to her impressions in Afghanistan, Maryam Majd can understand this very well: “If you are an Afghan woman, you know that you have to walk and not stand still; you must clench your fists and always be ready to defend yourself. This is the only way for young Afghan women to gain a minimum of security and defend themselves against attacks and harassment.” The photographer says her heart’s project is giving these women hope. “I want to accompany her life story. Maybe this will be an interesting documentary. That’s just an idea, of course.”
Her own everyday life has become even more difficult since the US sanctions against Iran and the Corona crisis. “Due to the high cost of paper, the newspapers have almost completely reduced their staff and in some cases were forced to stop their work altogether,” she says. The number of unemployed has also risen drastically in this industry, which is actually supposed to secure their livelihood. The Iranian economy has collapsed in many areas. “Working conditions have become much more difficult for people like me who work independently.”
After almost 40 years, women in Iran are allowed back into the stadium in Tehran for the first time
But Maryam Majd is helped by the increased international attention. The German women’s football magazine “Elfen” dedicated a long report to her in the first edition at the start of November 2019. She was ranked second in Asia at the AIPS Sports Media Awards – an international recognition for sports media – and was a finalist in the 2020 Photography 4 Humanity competition, an international initiative calling on photographers around the world to harness the power of human rights bring images to life.
This also seems to be the field of tension in which Maryam Majd herself lives: between hope and injustice, compassion and the failure of human rights. This also requires motifs that illustrate victories in small and large ways.
In October 2019, when women were allowed back into a football stadium in Tehran for the first time in almost 40 years, Maryam Majd was there with the camera. She was finalized for her footage of Iran’s World Cup qualifier against Cambodia. “Freedom in freedom” is what she called the colorfully made-up women cheering on the men’s team in the Azadi Stadium. Soon after, she was admitted to a photography course in New York, “where only ten photographers from around the world were selected, but the US embassy in Dubai refused my visa application, which I regret very much,” she says. Such setbacks are part of their everyday professional life.
Maryam Majd wants to make a difference with her photos from Iran, open up society
So she was actually admitted to the “FotoEvidence workshop” in France, which deals with the documentation of social injustice. But she did not receive an entry permit from the French authorities because she was only vaccinated with the Chinese corona vaccine Sinopharm. “Opportunities are lost, but there will definitely be new opportunities,” she then says, “I’ve learned to be patient and not to stop.” The constant ups and downs, the disappointments and often the anger are probably different too hard to bear.
But the photographer’s eyes light up when she succeeds in conveying the motivation of fearless athletes to the public with her pictures. “I’m not a good speaker or a writer. I talk to my photos,” says Maryam Majd. But how long she will continue this fight, how much strength she will muster for it, she herself cannot say. She already has only one plan: “One day I will write a book about the misfortune that happened to me.” The moments of happiness are all the more important now and then. (Frank Hellman)
