NPR: What or where is home? Is it a place or a people, a feeling or a memory, a reality or a fantasy?

Those questions are at the heart of My Iran: Six Women Photographers, an exhibition on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 9, 2020. All the photos were collected separately by the Sackler Gallery, one of the Smithsonian Institution's Asian art museums, and came together only for this showing. Much of the photographers' work has been displayed previously in Europe but rarely in the United States.

My Iran showcases the works of six female Iranian photographers — Hengameh Golestan, Newsha Tavakolian, Shadi Ghadirian, Malekeh Nayiny, Gohar Dashti and Mitra Tabrizian — and their attempts to express the psychological condition of the Iranian people and state 40 years after the Islamic Revolution. At their heart, the works seek to capture the deep divides, geographic and philosophical, between Iranians at home and abroad.

In the wake of the Islamic Revolution, many Iranians fled their homeland for a variety of reasons: their Western backgrounds or education, which were now suspect; liberals who opposed the Shah of Iran; men fleeing the draft for the Iran-Iraq War; women and children seeking greater opportunities outside the restrictive regime. However, just because they left does not mean they do not miss home.

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"Those who live in Iran tend to idealize life in the West, and those who live outside long for 'home,' " Tabrizian says in one of the exhibition's captions. "But what both groups have in common is the will to survive."

Some of the first images in the show are meant to invite you into this head space. The first is a video created by Tavakolian, a 38-year-old Iranian-based Magnum photographer and documentarian who has contributed to Time, National Geographic and The New York Times. The same shoot also provided a photograph for the collection, one that showcases a young woman almost engulfed by the tentacle branches of a bone-white dying tree.