Absolute: Tehran Cats by Caro Mirzoyan

What remains possible to photograph when visibility itself becomes dangerous? Produced in Tehran in the months of January and February 2025, the work investigates the conditions of image-making under systems of surveillance, restriction, and instability.

In the streets of Tehran, photographing people attracts immediate attention, suspicion, and confrontation. Turning the camera 45 degrees towards the ground, cats became the only subject that could be photographed without interrogation. The title Absolute refers to this condition of total limitation: the single remaining possibility among countless impossibilities.

The project is not about cats themselves. Rather, the 116 photographed cats become witnesses to a political and psychological atmosphere, marking the boundaries of what could still be seen, recorded, and carried across borders.

Made using an instant thermal-paper camera on discarded receipt paper collected from shops and streets, the photographs retain fragments of Farsi text, prices, and everyday transactions. Printed with millions of rials, they quietly document inflation and urban life while allowing the images to circulate unnoticed among ordinary commercial waste when leaving Iran.

Absolute: Tehran Cats reflects on photography as an act of survival, revealing how images persist even when the conditions of their making are deliberately constrained.