ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on opposing visual signs and images which exist side by side representing multifaceted reality of public life in Tehran. In the Iranian context, in contrast to Turkey, uniformity has been imposed on social semiotics by Islamism after the revolution, yet the public sphere is multi-layered or fragmented too, as it will show below using visual information gathered via participant observation. Both in Tehran and Istanbul, distancing from primordial traditions, participation in secular conditions, weakening of ideological Islamism within market structures, and novel interpretations of religious morality and processes of cohabitation all force us to reflect on multiple modernities paradigm. The presence of women in open and closed public spaces of Northern Tehran, with their demands to socialize with males, and to have spatial closeness with them, reverses the classical Islamic formula pertaining to their visibility in public. In Iran women without their 'hijab' cannot enter the public space.
