Capturing contrasts in Tehran

The 27-year-old Shirana Shahbazi is an expatriate Iranian photographing the country she still calls home; she sees herself as deconstructing Western ideas of Iran as oriental, exotic and, of course, hidebound. I suspect she oversimplifies our view of her homeland but that doesn't make her pictures any less interesting.

Those cinema-goers who have fallen for the cool simplicity of the films of Iranian directors such as Samira Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami will probably be more drawn to the quiet but heartfelt commentary in Shahbazi's bright colour photographs of Tehran.

Contrast is the dominant theme within each picture: multicoloured neon that seems anachronistic when lighting up the ancient shapes of the city's mosques, the ghostly black shape of a woman in a chador in front of a starkly modern building, various pictures of the unsentimental, concrete cityscape backed by mountains.

The disparity between the strict Islamic regime and the progressive city creeping up around it like a rambling plant is evidently Shahbazi's main preoccupation. She photographs traditionally dressed women in streets, on trains and in offices, as well as working with Tehran's street painters to convert photos of modern young women into huge pictures, an intriguing mix of ancient and contemporary as startling as the garish but carefully depicted girls who stare boldly out of these enormous canvases.