The day before photographer Jude Edginton left Iran, 15 British Marines were abducted, causing a huge diplomatic row. But what he managed to capture in the two weeks he spent there was an Iran very different from the baying mobs and angry Mullahs of the news reports. In fact, the first conversation he had with an Iranian when he landed in Tehran was with a taxi driver who said, “I must apologise for my government. Living here is like living in a Europe that has been run by the Vatican for the past 300 years.”
Edginton was in Iran with a friend who trains Arabian horses, and who had been invited to judge a horse show in Dezful, a city in the south of the country, 20 miles from the Iraqi border. Dezful, on the Euphrates, is flat and fiercely hot, with mud huts next to modern concrete buildings. They found the Iranians they met welcoming and politically switched-on, and the scenes Edginton captured seem a world away from our image of an oppressed, repressed people.
“The horse world is definitely a masculine one,” he says, “but when you get to Iran you notice that while women have to abide by Muslim dress, there’s a lot of strong, independent women around: at the horse show, there was an amazing woman, Sharzad Amir Asiani, who helps run the Iranian Arab Horse Society. We’re used to a certain kind of imagery of Iran, but there are fashionable women walking round Tehran wearing high-heeled boots with their headscarves.”
The average Iranian was proud of their country, and keen to discuss how their government is perceived. Edginton says it wasn’t uncommon to hear someone shout, “Do you think we should have nuclear power?” as he walked down the street.
But in Iran, they don’t let politics get in the way of the serious business of horses. The country still has a nomadic population of 1.5 million, and most horses are owned, trained and raced by the Turkmans, a nomadic tribe from the north of Iran (not, confusingly, Turkmenistan). Historically, Turkmans have always been horsemen who travel to wherever their skills as professional jockeys or trainers are needed. At the shows, horse and jockey sleep by the side of the track in make-shift tents and stables, while the races themselves are important local events that move around the country from town to town according to the seasons, a relic of Iran’s nomadic past. Most states have a couple of racetracks, and Khuzestan is no exception.
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“These shows are the one time local people get to learn more about how to train and breed Arab horses,” says Edginton. “They’re a bit like car shows in England, where loads of blokes meet to show their cars off and learn how to make them better for when they come back next year.” Though gambling is illegal, prize money is fine: each horse is “split” into shares and part of the price of the entry ticket to the races is a chit with a horse’s name on it: if the horse wins, you get a share of the prize money.
“There were about ten races in the day and the same horse might run in all the races,” says Edginton. “Their races are short and slow rather than long and fast like ours, so in Iran they run their horses like an easyJet aircraft: they’re constantly on the move.”