As the virus spread, more and more unrealistic pictures and videos spread with it. Of people’s sudden death on the streets to x-rays of infected ones showing their lungs filled with this unknown white liquid. As pictures of emptied capitals and their different towers started to emerge, photographers brave enough rushed to cemeteries to eternalize these moments of Martian- looking men setting to earth people under an apocalyptic sky.
As time went by and secrets of this mysterious phenomenon started to unveil, we eventually got used to these shots and they started to look very familiar, thus uninteresting to us. Nurses with elastic band marks, exhausted doctors and nurses, protests.. and the list goes on.
For street photographers such as I, it was a whole new challenge. How to manage these dead and emptied streets that were right out of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi books? No more smiles, no more grins, no more kids, no more shadows. All gone.
In this series I tried to look for something different. Something that could reflect feelings without the need of the expression of the face.
Hands are the other members of our body that we frequently use to express ourselves. Caring hands, demanding hands, waiting hands. This series, “Hands without a Face” was taken at the Covid-19 special unit in Tehran where nurses, doctors, patients and family could all be found at the same place.
One subject that I am passionate about is kids.
The ones on the street, playing, or drowned in their mysterious world.
This series is a part of a larger project on which I have been working a little bit after arriving to Tehran.
When my father passed away, I felt the urge to travel to Iran and see what it was that was holding him back from joining us permanently in Paris.
He never wanted me to travel to Iran, despite the fact that he adored the country that had welcomed him and his family that had fled Stalin’s regime many years ago, he was too afraid that I might get into some sort of trouble and be arrested (I was the last of 3 daughters, the little one) or kidnapped or I don’t know what.
One phenomenon that struck me right from the beginning, and still continues to startle me, is the short distance between living creatures and death. Death is everywhere, very close, and people are used to it being so close, and are not shocked by it, almost as though they praise death more than they cherish life.
