In And They Laughed at Me, Newsha Tavakolian undertakes a strikingly self-critical gesture: rather than assembling a retrospective of her most celebrated photographs, she turns to the images she once considered her “eyesores.” These are photographs made when she was just sixteen years old, at the very beginning of her career as a photojournalist in Tehran.

Produced in the politically and socially charged atmosphere of Iran in the late 1990s, these early works carry the urgency, fragility, and contradictions of youth. At the time, Tavakolian dismissed them as technically flawed or naïve. Decades later, she revisits them with a different gaze. What emerges is not embarrassment, but recognition: within these imperfect frames lie the foundations of a visual language that would later gain international acclaim.

The book unfolds as a deeply personal rite of passage. Set against the backdrop of renewed turmoil and difficult global realities, Tavakolian reflects on the journey from the hope and idealism of adolescence to the sobering weight of experience. As she writes, life ultimately confronts us with a decisive tension: whether to be drawn into darkness, or to fight it and move toward the light. The photographs—crowded streets, intimate domestic interiors, fleeting expressions of defiance and vulnerability—become markers of that passage. What once seemed like failure now reads as testimony: raw, searching, and honest.

Far from a conventional archive, And They Laughed at Me is a meditation on doubt, resilience, and artistic becoming. By reclaiming the images she once rejected, Tavakolian reframes imperfection as an essential stage of growth. The result is an unguarded and reflective volume that invites readers to reconsider the role of vulnerability in creative practice and to see missteps not as weaknesses, but as necessary steps toward clarity.