Atefeh Farhangikia

Realities, human rights issues, and the lives of marginalized communities. She works independently and without affiliation to any organization, institution, or political and social group, and has chosen documentary practice not as a tool for taking a position, but as a human mission and purpose; an approach grounded in research, sustained presence, and long term projects. Although her academic background was in physics, she ultimately chose photography as her path and documentary photography as her language. The precision, analytical vision, and intellectual structure shaped by scientific education remain present in her work, yet they have been directed toward observing human experience, social structures, and the fragile distance between visibility and erasure.

A significant part of her practice has focused on social documentary photography, particularly on the lives of psychiatric and neurological patients, vulnerable individuals, and those who exist at the margins of official narratives. She approaches these subjects not through the language of illness or pity, but through lived experience, isolation, fragility, endurance, memory, and the complex relationship between the individual and the society that surrounds them.

Her photographic vision is partly shaped by a free and independent reading of the work of Kaveh Golestan, the Iranian photographer and photojournalist whose uncompromising documentation of war, poverty, exile, and social inequality transformed the language of contemporary Iranian photography. What Farhangikia has taken from Golestan is not an imitation of his style, but an ethic of seeing: a refusal of sentimentality, a fidelity to presence, and the belief that the camera must remain attentive to those who are often erased from public memory.

In the narrative structure of her photo series and documentary projects, she has also been influenced by the writings and intellectual world of Susan Sontag, particularly her reflections on photography, suffering, representation, and the moral responsibility of looking. This influence can be seen in the restrained, contemplative, and at times distanced tone of her work, where images are presented not merely as documents, but as a sequence of questions about absence, power, and the ways in which suffering is seen.

Alongside her photographic practice, Farhangikia has worked in documentary film, research based visual storytelling, field reporting, and independent production, and has taught digital photography, portrait photography, documentary photography, and visual arts for many years. She is also the author of published works on documentary photography and has participated in lectures, workshops, and educational programs related to visual culture and documentary practice.

In recent years, she has combined photography with artificial intelligence and has used this intersection as an extension of documentary language. She employs technology not to distance herself from reality, but to reconstruct memory, imagine inaccessible spaces, and expand the narrative possibilities of documentary form. The result has been a body of documentary fiction films created through the integration of photography and artificial intelligence, in which archival thinking, photographic observation, and imaginative storytelling merge. These works have been presented at numerous international festivals and have received multiple awards and selections, particularly at festivals devoted to human rights, social justice, and experimental cinema.

Her work has been exhibited and screened in international festivals and cultural programs, where it has drawn attention for its sustained engagement with difficult subjects and its commitment to an independent and human centered perspective. Across photography, film, and new media, Atefeh Farhangikia continues to pursue documentary work as a human mission and purpose: directed toward those who live at the margins, resistant to simplification, and committed to preserving what might otherwise disappear in silence.