Kharabat Vol. 1

Kharabat Vol. 1: A photo archive of Iran's most enduring male subculture.

Kharabat Vol. 1, by Tehran-based artist Farhad Qashqai, is a found-photo book documenting the all-male world of Iran’s Kharabatis—a working-class subculture rooted in brotherhood, street rituals, and ancestral defiance. Sourced from digital relics, personal albums, and online ephemera, the book moves through prisons, gyms, living rooms, and city streets, revealing a world where loyalty is scripture, masculinity is sacred, and life itself is seen as Kharabat: ruins.
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About Khajistan:

Khajistan archives banned and overlooked media from Indus to Maghreb. We preserve real life that somehow disappears from the official record.

We don’t follow archival standards. We publish in fragments because that’s how our history reaches us; smudged. We gather whatever survives and push it into the world’s information networks. Ones that are lopsided and biased.

Khajistan believes in metadata as ijtihad. Each tag and each file name asks: What were we not allowed to remember? Leaflets that fell from the sky. Mujra posters. Madrassa books. Digests sold in silence. Photos. Tapes. Background scores. State propaganda. Zines no one kept. Footage no one wanted. Pictures pulled from your uncle’s porn stash. What slipped through, what rotted, what refuses to die. Khajistan saves it all. Not as heritage but as evidence of what was denied the right to shape our now.

We buy from and work with hoarders, collectors, exiles, the politically silenced, the religiously condemned, the gendered and erased. They collected to stay sane under false man‑gods and their false man‑laws. Fragments that gave meaning to their oppressed existence in a world ruled by a one story.

We are self-realized. After digitizing our originals, we sell them to UPenn, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, the Library of Congress, and their likes, where they’re catalogued and sealed in temperature-controlled vaults. Those sales fund new acquisitions, book publications, the creation of a digital reader housing our scanned materials, and an 85,000-item regional meme archive. Self-funding keeps us free from grant politics and the whims of institutional gatekeepers.

Here’s some of what we’ve done:

Indus collections: scanned 5,000 original Lollywood posters, lobby cards, and scrapbooks; hundreds of madrassa publications, Urdu erotic chapbooks, and Pashto, Hindko, and Sindhi local conspiracy‑theory books; 4,000+ VHS tapes, cassettes, and vinyl records; 1,000+ Urdu children’s magazines (1940s–2023); 1,200+ Urdu pulp‑fiction digests; and 800+ pieces of street ephemera and propaganda, including panaflex banners and handwritten flyers.

Persian & Turkish collections: digitized 15,000+ issues of Iranian magazines; film posters; pre‑revolution women’s and lifestyle magazines; caricature magazines; including men's exercise and bodybuilding zines; Ottoman smut; and Turkish erotic posters.

Arabic collections: Scanned 300+ issues of Arabic women’s magazines from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon (1920s–1970s); Cold War–era Soviet propaganda magazines in Arabic; Arabic comics and children’s textbooks; and rare Islamicate Judaica, including ketubahs, photos, wills, synagogue receipts, and travel documents of Jewish families across Iran, Iraq, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Khajistan unsettles what is known about us. We were not meant to survive, yet we did, and so did those before us. They left proof that people like us were here: they lived, they made, they played. Khajistan gathers that proof. Collecting it is our joy, and our proof that life insists on itself, even when others try to stop it. Let’s play.