Views in the Fog
by Saeedeh Afroukhteh
This series of photographs was taken in 2014 in the south-western city of Khorramshahr. At the time, I was a law student in my hometown of Rasht, in northern Iran, but had to migrate to Khorramshahr. I lived in a house facing the Grand Mosque of Khorramshahr and spent the first few weeks and half of my subsequent days wandering around Karoon River and talking to people in squatted houses, and photographing the ruins left behind by the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. The squatted houses were damaged residential buildings whose inhabitants had fled the war and were now occupied by new people. To me, those conversations were part of a process of moving away from dangers in the north to an area filled with land mines in the south, leading me to explore the suspense in the morning mist on the side of the river. I encountered the passersby appearing, although not knowingly, out of the mist on the bridge or along the river. In the weight of an unfelt presence, the present moment vanishes and the mist prepares a vision or an alternative time-space. They seem to exist in a different place and Khorramshahr is merely a land for their feeble bodies to suspend. They are not conscious of what happens on the other side of the mist, and merely contemplate on the events once experienced by that land.
