Chehrenama: Holding Time in Tehran’s Last Portrait Studio

Date: 23 September 2025 - 22:11

News ID: ۱۴۳۸۶۰

TEHRAN -- In the shadowed veins of Tehran’s oldest quarter, where cobblestones remember the hush of carriages and call of merchants, there lives a place that has seen nearly a century pass — not as a witness, but as a storyteller.
Hidden in plain sight along the storied stretch of Naserkhosrow, Atelie Chehrenama — the city’s oldest living portrait studio — continues to exist, defiantly, like a frame resisting time’s blur.
Founded in 1928 by Seyyed Reza Tabatabai, Chehrenama is not just a photo studio — it’s a vault of emotion, identity, and memory. Long before selfies flooded timelines, photography was not pastime but ritual, and each portrait a kind of miracle. In those early years, clients would sit stiff in wonder, watching their likeness slowly emerge like a ghost from chemistry and patience.
Today, inside a trio of small, dusty rooms, Ardeshir Fashami — a quiet man with kind eyes and the stillness of a darkroom — tends to this living museum. He’s the studio’s final custodian. He first walked into Chehrenama in 1989 as an apprentice. In 2001, he bought the atelier from the Tabatabai family. He never left.
“Every image has a number,” he says softly, running his hand across drawers of large-format negatives. “If a grandchild comes looking, I can find their grandfather’s face. Even if it’s from the 1920s.”
The walls around him hold stories, and not just in frames. They whisper of times when lines snaked down the street — schoolchildren, soldiers, families in their Sunday best — all waiting for their turn in front of the lens. There was once a rhythm to the place: two photographers, two retouchers, two printers, two assistants, and one owner. Nine people earned their daily bread from this studio. Now only Ardeshir remains.
Asked why he hasn’t taken on a student, he shrugs.
“There’s nothing left to teach,” he says. “ID photos are done by the government now. Schools have their own photographers. Even the army doesn’t send conscripts anymore. It’s all gone.”
What remains is a fierce love for a fading craft. “If I turn this place into a café or a restaurant, I’d make ten times more,” he laughs, the sound edged with melancholy. “But I love it too much. I’ll stay as long as I can.”
He traces the beginning of the end to the early 2000s — the arrival of digital photography. Where once there was darkroom chemistry and a meditative pace, now there were pixels and instant gratification. Photographers like Ardeshir, raised in the shadows of enlargers and the slow dance of exposure, found themselves faced with Photoshop and memory cards. Many closed their shutters for good.
“Analog photography was an art of patience,” he says. “People understood the process. They came back the next day. If the shot didn’t work, we tried again. They waited five days for their pictures — and they were grateful. Now? The first thing people ask is: can I have it in fifteen minutes?”
Chehrenama persists. A relic? Perhaps. But one that breathes.
There’s something deeply poetic — even defiant — in the way Ardeshir holds this place together. In an era where images vanish in seconds, he guards photographs that have lasted decades. In an alleyway of disappearing storefronts and shuttered history, Chehrenama glows like a filament bulb in a digital world.
Because sometimes, it’s not just about capturing a face. It’s about holding onto time.