As a first generation Persian American, I often look at my experiences as living between two worlds —a life perfected through struggle and patience vs one created by rapid construction, posing as the first. This duality allows me the distance to view things for what they are and brings sensitivities to a community of humans who sometimes just need the dust wiped off to expose their delicate nature.
I found home in being a translator to my immigrant parents. Always translating culture for them, enhancing more so my experience of our world of duality. Imagery and art replaces language, creating a shared experience of thought and feeling, which I often find challenging to redeem with them. Their value of poetry and beauty holds very traditional and abstract, but my upbringing in LA shared a border with a flash, money driven economy of unhealthy social currencies — still a humbling struggle finding balance between the two.
Making my own lane as a female photographer has been a journey of duality in it of its own. Photographing women the way they want to be seen, not the way men look at them. Fighting the male gaze, both subtly and explicitly. Inserting love between my muse and me, love between muse and lens.
Theres a big difference between this presence of love and its opposite —
We need to replace that in the pursuit of photography.
