EVE

“The camera here is not only a tool of observation but also a confrontation with the responsibility of seeing.”

The EVE documentary photography is a documentary photo series portraying women with intellectual and physical disabilities living under permanent care near Tehran.

The series explores not only their daily lives inside the institution but also the emotional atmosphere surrounding them: the fragile line between protection and isolation, care and neglect, and tenderness and invisibility. Their bodies carry the marks of time, illness, and social exclusion, while their presence questions society’s understanding of responsibility, compassion, and human dignity.

This project is shaped by a free visual approach influenced by documentary traditions that seek truth beyond aesthetics. Rather than creating images of sympathy, EVE attempts to build a space of witnessing—where the subject is not reduced to suffering but remains present as a complete human being. In this sense, the work also resonates with the ideas of Susan Sontag, especially her reflections on pain, representation, and the ethics of looking. The camera here is not only a tool of observation but also a confrontation with the responsibility of seeing.

EVE asks difficult questions without offering easy answers: Who is allowed to remain visible, and who disappears behind institutional walls? What does care truly mean when dignity is forgotten? How do silence, distance, and neglect become part of everyday architecture? Through these images, the project seeks not to explain, but to insist on presence—on the undeniable reality of lives too often left unseen.