The Quiet Language Of Seeing: Iranian Photographers To Follow

by Alexandra Mansilla

The Quiet Language Of Seeing: Iranian Photographers To Follow

30 Oct 2025

There is a quiet insistence in the way contemporary Iranian photographers look at the world. Their images neither explain nor persuade — they observe. Each photograph becomes a negotiation between what can be shown and what must remain unsaid, between intimacy and distance, memory and disappearance.

Their photography is not driven by spectacle or commentary. Instead, it unfolds slowly, revealing fragments of daily life, emotional residue, and the fragile architecture of personal and collective memory. Through restraint and precision, these artists turn limitation into language — finding freedom in what is withheld, and truth in what flickers just beyond visibility.

Shahram Saadat

Shahram Saadat, a British-Iranian photographer, says his practice is inspired by human idiosyncrasies: “I channel the erratic spontaneity of documentary-style photography into staged scenes, underpinned by conceptual thinking.”

In the same interview with VICE, he elaborated on his process: “Many of my projects have been studies of people from certain areas — whether it is people from Bath interacting with an electrostatic machine or people from Norwich posing in target practice posters. I like photographing people who haven’t necessarily been in a controlled photographic environment before. Their interaction shifts between each image as they become more at ease with the setting, and it brings a freshness more in keeping with the documentary aesthetic. Every project still reflects my interest in this field, but in a much more refined environment — putting the concept first and the image second.”

Instagram: @studio.saadat

And of course, you have probably seen his striking series The Whale, which portrays people passing through a carwash in southern England.

Instagram: @studio.saadat

Newsha Tavakolian

Newsha Tavakolian’s practice merges artistic expression with documentary precision, dissolving the boundary between the real and the imagined. She once said, “In Iran, too many people are having trouble with how to label me or my work, but for me, it is not really important what I am. What really matters to me is telling stories.”

Her projects span a wide spectrum — from the struggles of women in Iran and beyond to the lingering consequences of conflict. Her approach is deliberate, reflective, and layered. In her images, the photographer’s presence is always perceptible — self-aware, attuned to her subjects, and conscious of the world she captures.

Instagram: @newshatavakolian

Over the course of her career, Tavakolian has received numerous honours, including the Carmignac Gestion Award and the Prince Claus Award (as principal laureate), among other international photography prizes. Her work has been exhibited in major institutions around the world and is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Photo: @magnumphotos

Sina Shiri

Sina Shiri blurs the line between photojournalism and visual poetry. A self-taught photographer from Rasht, he began photographing at sixteen, documenting everyday life with both tenderness and irony. His images balance realism and surrealism — fleeting moments rendered with cinematic tension and quiet humour.

Instagram: @sinashirii

Shiri’s work often captures the ordinary rhythms of Iranian life: families at picnics, young people wandering city streets, and the subtle choreography of public spaces. As VICE wrote in its feature A Surreal Glimpse Into Everyday Life in Iran, his photographs “often seem too strange not to have been staged, yet they are spontaneous works of chance, timing, and persistence.”

Instagram: @sinashirii

Alborz Kazemi

Alborz Kazemi moves fluidly between photography, film, and installation, using each medium to question how memory and identity are constructed. Trained in painting at Tehran’s School of Fine Arts, he later shifted toward photography — a transition that shaped his visual sensitivity and his fascination with fragmented narratives.

Instagram: @_alborzkazemi

In series such as None Turned into Memory, Kazemi reworks analogue negatives and collages personal archives, creating disjointed images that feel both intimate and disorienting. His work evokes the instability of recollection — how moments dissolve, reappear, and transform through time.

None Turned into Memory. Source: darz.art

Kazemi’s photographs do not attempt to preserve memory, but to expose its fragility — showing how every image is already an act of forgetting.

Maryam Takhtkeshian

Maryam Takhtkeshian’s work moves between memory and absence, between what remains and what fades. Trained in photography at Azad University in Tehran, she has also worked as a still photographer in Iranian cinema since 2005.

In her series No Soldier Has Returned From War, Takhtkeshian revisits the aftermath of conflict through personal memory. Using expired film and a vintage Agfa Isolette camera, she produces trembling, fragile images that feel both archival and intimate. Faces blur, landscapes dissolve — as if memory itself were eroding.

Source: silkroadartgallery.com

She once wrote: “I remember a misty image of my childhood so distant and fragile that I do not know whether it is fantasy or reality.” That uncertainty sits at the heart of her practice. The work isn’t about war, but about what it leaves behind — the spaces emptied of presence, the quiet persistence of what refuses to disappear.

by Alexandra Mansilla