I am an Iranian born British photographer ( Tehran 1978).
I wanted to be a photographer from the age of 12 but I had to wait until I was 40 to realise my dream. becoming a photographic artist has been the quest of my life.
I was 11-12 years old when my mother who suffered from mental health disorders and rejected me as a child repeatedly and my abusive father abandoned me to an orphanage in north of Tehran. The orphanage had a very large garden where I spoke to trees which I had befriended many of them. In the meantime, I had this vision in my head that I my parents were not my real parents. Try “real” parents were loving and wanted me. One day the kids were taken for a day out to Niavaran Palace, the residence of the ex-Shah of Iran which was converted to a museum after the 1979 revolution. During that visit, I saw a photograph, a large black and white photograph of trees. The trees were in that photograph appeared to be more real than of the trees which I knew and considered them as my friends. That images ( that I now know it was by Ansel Adams ) was a photographic proof for me that perhaps a different, a better world exist in parallel to where I was living. The word that I would meet my “real” parents and had those beautiful trees! I wanted to move to that “other’”world. Ever since that moment of realisation, I wanted to be an artist and to express myself through the medium of photography.
Studying art and photography was not an option for me. I had to do a lot of zig
