Through her work, she critically comments on the pushes and pulls between tradition and modernity for women living in Iran, as well as other contradictions that exist in everyday life.
[citation needed] In 2000, Ghadirian married the Iranian photographer and author Peyman Hooshmandzadeh, who had also studied photography at Azad University.
Portraits taken in the Qajar period were traditionally captured in a formal setting, and the subject often posed with prized possessions and objects that pointed to elite status.
This juxtaposition of the traditional and the contemporaneous served as a starting off point for later series that further developed around the theme of contradiction in everyday life in contemporary Iran.
This imitates how Western women were shown in imported magazines due to Iranian censorship during Ghadirian's childhood.
The series shows an Iranian woman wearing a traditional hijab weaving a spiderweb across various openings like doorways and windows, creating a separation between the figure and the outside world.
The traveling exhibition is a compilation of works by Ghardirian along with 11 other female artists that addresses the complexity of the Western stereotype of the hijab and internal, everyday struggles for women in the Arab world.
[14] Ghadirian contributed two photos from her Miss Butterfly (2011) series to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts' "Make Believe" exhibition that was shown from July 20, 2019 to January 20, 2020.
"Kay Nielson's Enchanted Vision: the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection" was a companion exhibition shown in an adjacent room.
"Make Believe" also featured 4 other contemporary photographers: Hellen van Meene, Paolo Ventura, Nicholas Kahn, and Richard Selesnick.
[15][16] Shadi Ghadirian’s first solo exhibitions were at Golestan Gallery in Tehran, Iran and Leighton House Museum in London, UK, both in 1999.
[17] In 1995, Ghadirian won a competition for a photograph from her Qajar series depicting two women in hijabs holding a mirror reflecting banned books in a shelf.