On Iran’s islands, an intriguing portrait carries new meaning

By Adam Pourahmadi, CNN

(CNN) — Salimeh stands in her yard, a rug suspended behind her, still heavy from washing. Her clothes, patterned in vivid reds, pinks and oranges, echo the mineral-rich sands of Iran’s Qeshm and Hormuz islands, where the earth itself seems to glow. The wind lifts her veil, just enough to show its gentle presence, and it billows out across her body. She’s caught, mid-motion, in the exact moment of its arrival.

Photographer Hoda Afshar recalls the image as something almost accidental. Working with a medium-format analog camera, she had been adjusting, focusing, waiting. Salimeh stood patiently. Then the wind came and she pressed the shutter.

Afshar has been returning to Iran’s southern islands of Hormuz and Qeshm since 2015, photographing the land, its residents and the invisible, esoteric forces that shape life there — the winds, which locals believe to be powerful entities.

Their belief runs through the islands like an undercurrent. Some winds are considered benign; others harmful. One type of wind known as zār, can, they say, enter the body and cause distress or illness.

In Afshar’s portrait, Salimeh’s mask, painted with thick eyebrows and a mustache, is part of that belief. It is meant to deceive the spirits, to make her appear male. Women, it is believed, are more vulnerable to the zār.

The photo featured in Afshar’s 2021 book, “Speak the Wind” – one of dozens of images shaped by the tension between the visible and the invisible, landscape and memory, and the body and the forces said to move through it.

Some five years later, amid a war between the US, Israel, and Iran, these islands dotted across the Strait of Hormuz are caught in a different kind of bluster. Warships, an ongoing US blockade, and Iranian mines scattered in the sea now threaten the waters around the islands of Hormuz and Qeshm, placing communities long shaped by trade and migration at the center of a global crisis.

In a video call from Berlin, where she is currently on an artist residency, Afshar describes the islanders off the coast of Iran as “some of the most hospitable and cheerful people I know,” so deeply tied to the land that even a day away leaves them “restless and ill.”

Afshar’s family still lives on Qeshm. In the first week of the war, Iran said a US-Israeli strike hit a desalination plant on the island – a vital lifeline in an already water-scarce region. From afar, she hears fragments of what daily life has become: the heavy military presence, the bombings that, as she said one relative put it, “cut through your body like an earthquake.”

Her images feel newly charged in this context, poetic portraits unfolding in a landscape now threatened by war.

The region’s beliefs around the winds have long historical roots, she explained.

For centuries, these islands have been at the crossroads of empires, trade routes and cultures. Iranian, Arab and European powers have all laid claim to them. Their shores have received merchants, soldiers and migrants moving between East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent.

With them came languages, customs, and beliefs.

That history, passed through oral memory, remains embedded in the cultural fabric of the islands, she said. She explained that many residents are of African descent, though that identity is frequently obscured or denied, shaped by longstanding social hierarchies.

Within the zār belief, those same histories are inverted. The only people believed capable of negotiating with the possessing winds, of restoring balance, are shamans of African descent. In ritual gatherings, music, incense and movement create a space where the unseen becomes, briefly, tangible.

For Afshar, “Speak the Wind” was about tracing how landscape, history and the body shape one another.

“You see how the connection people have to their landscape determines how they look,” she said, particularly their clothing, which is influenced by the landscape. “ It’s very obvious, the connection between the two.”

That connection extends beyond material appearances. Certain trees on the islands are believed to harbor these winds; to sleep beneath them is to risk possession.

Afshar’s series is a portrait of a place where history accumulates. And as new forms of violence shape the present, Afshar returns to a thought that underpins her entire project: what has happened to a place does not simply vanish.

“It’s not going to leave,” she said. “The historical memory of the place, every time something violent happens, it stays. Forever.”

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