Feet on the Clouds

“Photography is not only about witnessing pain, but about giving dignity to those whose suffering has been forgotten.”

“Feet on the Clouds” is a documentary photography and portrait series by Atefeh Farhangikia, created between 2012 and 2015 at Saraye Ehsan Center, located in the village of Do Tappeh, Kahrizak, Tehran, where abandoned women suffering from psychological and mental disorders are cared for on a full-time basis.

In this project, the photographer deliberately moves away from purely aesthetic compositions and formal artistic framing, choosing instead a direct and honest encounter with the subjects’ everyday lives. The series focuses on portraiture and daily life without any staging or artificial arrangement. The frames are centered mainly on their eyes, eyes that silently narrate pain, abandonment, loneliness, and the quiet weight of forgotten lives. These faces are not presented merely as visual subjects but as carriers of lived histories and unspoken suffering.

The title “Feet on the Clouds” serves as a metaphor for a suspended existence, fragile, unstable, and distant from the solid ground of ordinary social life, a state between presence and absence, between being seen and being erased.

This body of work resonates deeply with the reflections of Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, where she reminds us that confronting another person’s suffering is never simply about looking at an image but about accepting an ethical responsibility toward human pain. In this sense, photography becomes not a tool for displaying suffering but an act of witnessing, of seeing, of remembering, and of asking the viewer to pause.

Through this project, Atefeh Farhangikia attempts not to speak for these women but to create the possibility for them to be seen with dignity, without judgment, and without exaggeration. These photographs are an invitation to look again at lives too often pushed outside the frame of society.