Views in the Fog

In 2014, I was a law student in my hometown of Rasht, in northern Iran, when I moved to Khorramshahr, in the southwest of the country. I lived in a house facing the city’s Grand Mosque and spent much of my time walking along the Karun River, photographing the ruins left by the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s and talking with people living in damaged houses. Their original inhabitants had fled during the war, and new families had since settled there.

Moving from the north to a land still marked by mines, I became drawn to the suspense of the morning mist along the river. Passersby emerged from it on the bridge or along the banks, unaware of my presence. In the mist, the present moment seems to dissolve, opening onto another time and space. The figures appear to belong elsewhere, as though Khorramshahr were simply the ground on which their fragile bodies rest, quietly contemplating what this land once lived through.