feet on the clouds

“Feet On The Clouds” is a documentary series of portraits of women living with mental illness, photographed between 2012 and 2016 at Sarayeh Ehsan Psychiatric Care Center in “Kahrizak”, the village of “Dotappeh”, Tehran, Iran.

The series is an attempt to move closer to faces that are often hidden behind the name of an illness, social labels, and the distance imposed by others. These photographs are not concerned with representing illness itself, but with seeking the presence of the person. A presence revealed through a gaze, a silence, exhaustion, waiting, and brief moments of vulnerability.

In this project, the photographer deliberately tried to move away from established rules and preconceived ways of seeing in documentary photography, not to create a dramatic or aestheticized image, but to arrive at a direct and simple encounter with each face. The frames avoid unnecessary detail, staging, and emphasis on technique, focusing instead on the act of portraiture and on the emotional weight carried within it.

These portraits do not seek to explain suffering or turn it into something to be observed. They simply try to create a brief pause, a moment in which the viewer can step beyond the safe distance of judgment and come face to face with another human being. In this series, the photographs are less a document of a place or a condition than a trace of the presence of people whose being seen is itself a form of narrative.