Sometimes expectations make us blind.

Especially as a foreign photographer it seems impossible not to reproduce clichés. The photographer as well as the viewer are culturally biased and often lack consciousness about it. The exotic is catching our interest and we follow certain aesthetics and subjects that are composed from our cultural und media influence.

The image of Iran is shaped by bearded men, veiled women and conflicts. Images that may be found in Iran but do not represent the country at large.

In the pictures of my series, content and aesthetics are only being suggested, but withdraw from the exact depiction as usually expected from photography. Therefore they test the logic of our perception and refer to the vein of our brain to immediate association. Through my photography the viewers are given possibility to check their codes of perception. As a search between seeing and not-seeing they again make the perception an active process.

What is photographed blurs, gets vague and creates an imaginary place where description and imagination combine. The images explore the existent perceptions and the known imagery of the country and travel photography. Therefore they raise the question what a picture can tell - wether it transports content or only shows its own alluring surface.

* IRN, 2019