IN THE EXODUS, I LOVE YOU MORE

There’s a certain truth that emerges through migration, and in the way that distance makes you see things... this sense that leaving ruptures your connection to the place that you’ve left behind, so that, even when you return, it’s like you’re always waiting to arrive.

In the Exodus, I love you more is an ongoing photographic series that I began in 2014. It is a record of my changing vision of, and relationship to, my homeland, Iran: a relationship that has been shaped by my having been away, by that distance that increases the nearness of all the things to which memory clings, and which renders the familiar… strange, and veiled. It is an attempt to embrace that distance and to turn it into a kind of seeing. To let what is both there and not there shine through the surface. To let the surface speak. It is an attempt to explore the interplay of presence and absence in the history of Iran and in Iranians’ lives, and to discover the truth that lies there in their never-ending meeting, in-between.