SINGING LIKE THE BIRDS SING
Title inspired by a saying attributed to the Persian poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi.
“Please, tell your friends that Iran is beautiful and peaceful, and that people here are so kind.”
It was a sentence I heard over and over again while travelling across Iran.
People rarely asked me about politics. Instead, they spoke about how they were perceived abroad. They wanted to be seen beyond headlines, sanctions and fear—not as a threat, but as ordinary people: neighbours, students, workers, parents, children.
Many of them looked straight into my camera. Not because they were performing for it, but because they wanted to be seen. Those portraits became a conversation rather than an observation—an encounter between two people, and an invitation to look beyond inherited representations.
This series grew from those encounters.
Rather than attempting to explain Iran, these photographs linger on everyday gestures, shared meals, family portraits and fleeting conversations. They do not seek to define a country, but to question the distance between lived experience and the stories we tell about one another.
These photographs still leave me with the same question: what does it mean to look beyond inherited representations?
Perhaps photography cannot undo stereotypes.
It can, however, become an invitation to look again.
