Nareng and Torang, 2004

Knock Knock, 2006

The Pourcipine-and-His-Apples, 2004

The Famous Smile, 2004

The Prayer of the Bird, 2004

A Lonely Snowman, 2006

The Dragopnfly on my Shoes, 2005

Story of a Luliby, 2004

The Children on our Block, 2006

Interview with Hoda Hadadi
By Melissa Hibbard

Hoda Hadadi is an book illustrator, writer and poet in Tehran, Iran.

Q: How did you get started in the field of illustration?

A: I started doing children’s illustrations at Kayhan e Bacheha magazine which used to be an important and prestigious starting point for illustrators. I also worked for Sourush Nojavan magazine. From there, I was commissioned to create works for other magazines and in 2000 I illustrated my first book.

Q: Who’s your audience?

A: In the beginning my focus was more on young adults but now my interest is in small children.

Q: What was the story of your first book?

A : The story was about me teaching a young boy how to draw. His mother forced him to take the drawing class but the boy didn’t want to learn how to draw. He wanted to be a carpenter.

Q: Your style is mostly collage. What is your source of inspiration?

A: I like collage because you can be very spontaneous in collage. There are a lot of coincidences or accidents in this medium. With painting and drawing, everything is calculated. Of course there is spontaneity in other mediums but not as much. In collage you might have an idea of something that you want to bring to fruition but the result is often times something completely different. The role of the illustrator using this technique is making order from all the little parts and pieces, in my case, mostly paper.

Q: What kind of stories interests you and what kind of characters do you like to follow?

A: The inspiration for most of my stories comes from real incidents and real characters. I use my own childhood as the source of inspiration and hope that the audience can relate to my experiences. I look inside the 5 year old Hoda Hadadi and ask her what she would like? What would she do?

Q: So what does the 5-year-old Hoda relate to?

A: I remember minimalist, simplified images being very appealing to me. I was attracted to animations that were made with only a few lines - very nominal and clean. Here in Iran, since we have no way here to track what children want or how they respond to what they see in any kind of scientific way, I can only use my own experiences to communicate with my audience.

Q: Are you telling children’s stories meant for children, or are these adult stories that you disguise as children’s stories?

A: It isn’t important for me to put myself or my work in such categories. What is important is the incident or event that inspires me. Whether it’s a child’s story or an adult’s story is secondary. It doesn’t matter what age group relates to this story.

Q: You have attended a lot of festivals and exhibitions outside Iran. What is you impression of how your work is received internationally?

A: I’ve been to many festivals, in particular Japan and Eastern Europe. It has been good experience for me. Iranian Illustrators are being well received internationally. Unfortunately, though, their works haven’t been published outside Iran. The problem is that the texts or rather the stories aren’t accessible to international audiences and therefore it’s hard to get our books published. Many times, books are sent to festivals with Farsi text. We don’t bother to translate the stories and therefore internationally, people can only connect to the illustrations. The text is often times ignored. The few things that have been published are printed in Eastern countries. I have had some work published in Korea. We haven’t been able to break through in the West.

Q: Recently your poetry has been compiled in a book about contemporary female poets in Iran. How did that come about?

A: Yes, there was a book published – A Compilation of Contemporary Iranian Women Poets.

Q: Has this book been published outside Iran?

A: No and I doubt it will. There’s little effort here in Iran to disseminate the literary work of contemporary Iranian poets and writers. Translations are only done for a few Iranian writers who are well-known outside Iran like Mahmoud Dowlat Abadi. A friend of mine went to a literary festival in Germany recently. Iranian literature was criticized as no longer having anything universal to say. I don’t disagree with this but I think this is normal. In today’s world, art is very individualistic; each person has his or her own way of seeing the world. It’s not like before where social and artistic philosophies were followed by many people. Each person has his or her own philosophy to express and I think it’s the same with art. It’s the responsibility of the individual artists to introduce his or her own ideas, aesthetics and philosophy to the outside world.

Q: Where do you see yourself in all of this?

A: I don’t know how to answer this question because I don’t know where I am going. I do know that right now I have a lot of interest in poetry and illustration. Storytelling has become less important to me. These are things that are happening in life without any plan. I can’t plan what I want or how I see myself. I’m living spontaneously. Since nothing is predictably in this country, I can’t predict anything for myself. And regardless of what I predict, it rarely happens. Something else always happens.

Q: In Iran books aren’t publicized in the same way films are. Is it because they don’t know how to do it or they don’t want to do it?

A: I think the publishing companies don’t feel there is a necessity for such things. There is effort in publicizing science or math books or touristy books for foreigners. They don’t think there would be any financial return for investing in publicity for novels and poetry.

Q: Let’s talk about the difficulties of publishing in Iran.

A: There are many problems. The publishers take the original works and don’t give them back the artists, the pay is very low in this industry, paper is limited. The numbers of copies that are printed are few. And the printing quality of the work is usually reduced by between 20 and 30 per cent. These are the difficulties we face.

Q: I also notice that the lay out of children’s books is weak. Is this a result of the publishing or just something that isn’t paid much attention to?

A: It is important. The graphic artists that get involved usually don’t understand the media they are working in. Their approach to designing a book is the same as their approach to designing a poster. The book publisher usually wants to commission fewer drawings thereby bringing down the cost. Then they bring in a graphic designer to stretch those few illustrations over the course of the book and end up with something that lacks unity and doesn’t flow well from beginning to end.

Q: Do you see yourself as an Iranian illustrator?

A: I think that not just me but all of us have reached a point were we have a certain accent, a unified Iranian accent. When we go to festivals around the world, I think you can definitely sense the Iranian accent in all of our work. If you look at children’s book here in Iran, you can find a certain style, a common thread. If I were going to define that accent I would first bring attention to the lack of movements in our work. You could compare it to old Iranian miniatures where everything is two dimensional. Everything is static. There is little action in our compositions.

Something is happened regarding text and illustration, since the two are not communicating with each other, they are each doing their own thing, creating their own style. A publisher will give an illustrator a story to illustrate but the artist doesn’t like the story. The illustrator will put aside the story and come up with something on his or her own, without consideration for the story. On one hand it’s good that the illustrator is above the text but on the other hand I think it’s bad for the audience. The readers can’t connect the text and illustration together.

Q: Have there been any studies about how children respond to the books, if they like what you are doing or not?

A: Here, in Iran, we don’t have any concrete statistics about how an audience relates to something like a book or story and publishers never give us any feedback about how successful a book is. We have no statistics, only personal research. We might give a new book to a school and try to get the kids’ responses. That’s the only way we get feedback.

Q: Going back to a question before: You mentioned Iranian storytelling isn’t as universal as illustration. I assume your colleagues are aware of this and trying to resolve this issue. How are you trying to resolve this issue?

A: In the last couple of years a colleague and I started a discussion in a magazine about “The Author Illustrator” which refers to the book illustrator who writes his or her own stories. Right now there are so many children’s books that need to be reedited. You could take any one story and cut it down by 10 pages and it wouldn’t affect the story whatsoever. Our goal was to edit the stories to make them more minimalist, therefore making them more universal. We are also write new stories that are inspired by illustrations that we have already created. Now we are trying to publish our own books, based on these criteria. We are trying to detach ourselves from the previous school of thought that centers on the written text and focus on the image, instead. We are working to come up with more easily translatable stories. We are doing this right now. I know a few illustrators who are following this method and the publishers have been very supportive, thus far, but I can’t tell you how successful it is yet. Time will tell.

Artist's Biography

Hoda Hadadi was born in 1977 in Tehran, Iran. She received her M.A. in Graphic Design from The Art University in Tehran. Ms. Hadadi started her illustration career in 1998 working for the prestigious children’s magazines Kayhan e Bacheha, Souroush and Docharkheh. Her first book of illustrations, Siasat Nameh-Peydayesh was published in 1999 and since then more than 20 books of her work have been published. She has written and illustrated 5 children’s books, including My Cloudy Day (2000). Her illustrations and writing have been exhibited international and she has won several prestigious awards for her work including “Noma Encouragement Prize” (Japan, 2000); “First Prize” (Kanoon Book Festival, Iran, 2005); and “Audience Award” (Soroush Magazine, Iran, 2002,3). Her first book of poetry, The Orange Genie was published in 2005.