PERPLEXITY

“Perplexity” is a documentary photography series portraying men between the ages of nine and eighty living with physical and mobility disabilities and Down syndrome, residents of the “Farzandan-e Man” care center in “Bagher Shahr”, Tehran, where they are cared for on a full-time basis.

Photographed between 2018 and 2020, the series moves beyond the conventions of portraiture and turns instead toward the fragments and layers of everyday life. The photographs do not seek merely to record faces, but to approach the textures of existence: gestures, waiting, routines, fatigue, intimacy, and the silent relationships between bodies and space.

The central intention of the series is to confront the viewer with what is so often overlooked. These images are conceived as a visual interruption, an attempt to strike the viewer’s gaze and draw attention to lives that remain largely unseen, hidden behind institutional walls and social indifference. The series was strongly influenced by the work of Kaveh Golestan, one of Iran’s most important documentary photographers and photojournalists. Golestan is especially known for his uncompromising visual narratives of marginalized lives and for his ability to confront the viewer with realities that are often ignored.

In particular, “Perplexity” draws inspiration from his series Majnoon. Like Golestan’s photographs, this work does not seek to aestheticize suffering or turn it into spectacle. Instead, it attempts to create a direct and unsettling encounter between the subject and the viewer, an encounter in which the act of being seen becomes, in itself, a form of testimony and resistance.