Somewhere To Live

I was 18 years old that I was accepted at the university, and left my hometown and family to another city. I had been living and working in different cities of Iran for eighteen years. I had limited time to go to my hometown and visit my family. I almost lost my connection with them. I have always been traveling and making friends and meeting new people was my main concern. Since I took my camera with me, I had still been searching for interesting subjects to take pictures and narrate them. I wanted to discover the hidden and less observed sides of the lives and emotions of people. It was where there seems to be no boundary between me and the others. Most of the time, recording others seemed disappointing since there were so many cultural and personal censorships in others.
In 2019, I returned to my hometown and family and started my psychotherapy. In that period, I entirely focused on myself. All the things I had known apparent about myself changed into a vague and intricate puzzle. Even sometimes, new perceptions brought about fears and revealed separated and heterogeneous pieces of my life. I always tried to redefine myself.

After many years of taking photos, I turned the camera to my face and tried to capture my self-portraits. During that period, I noticed that I craved for expressing the untold stories of my life, the darker sides of my life, which I had been searching for in other people’s lives. It seemed that my life was torn apart into two pieces; one of them was my outer life spending with others, and they knew me through its various aspects. Another part was my inner, rejected, and hidden side, which was like an island. I discovered it in my psychotherapy sessions. This world kept me away from my outer world, even my closest people, like my family. The camera provided me with an opportunity to value my inner world as same as the outer one without fear. My most important concern was truthful expressing my life and challenges. I did not turn the camera to my face, but my life.

“Somewhere to Live” is a journey of my life, my relationships, my family, and my friends for expressing my rejected experiences. It is a path through a one-thousand jigsaw puzzle of my inner and outer worlds. I try my best to make a connection between them. I try to show a union between me and myself, me and others, as well as me and the world around, this time from inside to outside.

On-Going...