In her best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi wrote that she did not know who she was when she was wearing a veil. So too, perhaps, Houra Yaghoubi’s images of faceless, chador-draped women are intended as a metaphor for the loss of identity. Because her veiled figures are visually linked to nineteenth-century stereotypes of women, Yaghoubi’s seeming social criticism is perfectly acceptable in present-day Iran. The Persian couplets that appear in several of the prints are drawn from the Iranian national epic, the Shahnama (Book of Kings), which includes references to women as the backbone of their nations, in stark contrast to the ineffectual, doll-like figures depicted by Yaghoubi. Along with other contemporary Iranian artists, she contemplates a society caught between the present and the past.