My work, more than anything, is about telling a story about the relationships between people and space. I have always felt pulled between worlds, as if standing at the threshold of a doorway. This is the burden and the blessing of living in diaspora. The hyphen in Iranian-American carries with it the weight of my world, the linking of two cultures, two universes, that come together to create a new, singular identity. As such, I have spent my life dedicated to the search for meaning of what it would mean to walk through the door–any door–and exist fully in a space, whether physical or relational.

My work takes the lens of the ethnographer watching from a distance, and of an old friend sitting at the table. Rarely do my photos come in close – instead the camera sits on the edges of a room, stepping back to see the whole scene. This was totally unconscious for a long time, but I have come to lean into the perspective – to give context to the subject, to tell a story, to capture a moment. I am not interested in the abstract, I want to touch what’s real.

I consider my work that of the translator – I spend very little time planning photos, instead walking through the world and waiting for the photographs to make themselves known to me, and finding a way to express that feeling visually. Because of this, my practice is one of a series of educated guesses - of learning how to be at the right place at the right time. I have been so fundamentally shaped by the places I have lived and none more than Southern California.

Astonishing Light seeks to find what is real within myself, to contextualize my own relationship with the desert – characterized by a deep, primal pull in my gut to a homeland I have never known – into a larger tapestry woven with the social, political, and ecological threads that have shaped my work and my history.