•Hafiz

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In Hafiz (Guardians of the Quran), the Turkish-Persian photographer Sabiha Çimen offers a new perspective on young Muslim women. Shot on medium-format film and published as a photobook with more than 300 images, the project explores the everyday lives of girls who, like her, attend Quranic schools to learn the sacred text, a rite of passage from childhood to young adulthood marked by camaraderie, dreaming, play and rebellion.

In the process, Çimen returns to her own experience –“I’ve seen myself again as I was then”– and struggles to gain the trust of her subjects, getting round limits to intimacy with them and overcoming cultural barriers such as the taboo of images in Islam. Far from the exoticising and reductionist view that, in her opinion, confines Muslim women to clichés, she highlights their individuality and distinct personalities, as well as their status as young women and adolescents who are not so different from young women and adolescents anywhere else. With her recent incorporation into the iconic, exclusive agency Magnum, Sabiha Çimen shows that there is still more to say in the world of documentary photography.

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Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1986, Sabiha Çimen is a self-taught photographer who lives between Istanbul and New York. She holds a degree in International Trade and Finance from Istanbul Bilgi University and a master’s degree in Cultural Studies. Her first photographic project Hafiz has gained international recognition and has received the Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Award, the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, the Canon Grant for Women Photojournalists, and the World Press Photo for long-term projects, among others. Sabiha Çimen is an associate photographer at Magnum Photos Agency.

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