It was Nowruz 2020. COVID had just arrived, and no one knew how long it would stay. Wandering through the streets of Darrous, in Tehran, I noticed a sign: Garmabeh Golestan, the “Rose Garden Bathhouse.”
I went in. At the entrance, two men were deep in conversation, without masks, as if nothing were happening outside. The bathhouse itself was empty. I began to photograph.
The longer I stayed, the less I needed a complete picture of the place. A tile, a washbasin, a mirror, a door: each fragment could be all that remained in the frame, leaving the rest of the bathhouse to be completed in the mind. Perhaps this is what a photograph does: it separates one thing from everything else and says, “Look at this.”
For a few hours, like those two men, I forgot about COVID. Before leaving, I asked the old man if I could come back the next day. “Yeah, come,” he said. I never went back.
Garmabeh Golestan 1 Garmabeh Golestan 2 Garmabeh Golestan 3 Garmabeh Golestan 4 Garmabeh Golestan 5 Garmabeh Golestan 6 Garmabeh Golestan 7 Garmabeh Golestan 8 Garmabeh Golestan 9 Garmabeh Golestan 10 Garmabeh Golestan 11
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