The pursuit of an industrial engineering degree brought 18-year-old Iranian Soody Sharifi to study in the United States in 1979.  "But then the Revolution happened, and I didn't go back for 20 years," she says.  Meanwhile, Sharifi married, moved to Houston, and had a daughter.  When she finally visited her native country in 1999, she began taking photographs after discovering that "lots of things had changed for women," but wondering "as a feminist, how Iranian women, who are still controlled by the covering of their bodies from head to toe, would behave inside the house.  We never get a glimpse inside the average Islamic house because we are considered intruders."

Sharifi decided to challenge Islam's prohibition against image-making by photographing an average Iranian family "to show the other side."  Sharifi hopes that her photographs will "communicate to viewers that teenagers are universal - they go through the same anxieties and have the same desires everywhere."