Absolute: Tehran Cats

Absolute is a photo series made under surveillance and restriction. Focusing on Tehran street cats, the artist used Thermal paper photo camera and printed on receipt paper, smuggling the fragile images across borders.

Absolute: Tehran Cats is the first chapter of an ongoing series investigating the conditions of image-making under systems of surveillance, restriction, and instability. Produced in Tehran during January and February, the work emerged from a practical and existential question: what is still possible to photograph in public space while remaining unnoticed, secure, and alive.

In the streets of Tehran, photographing people immediately attracted attention, suspicion, and potential confrontation. To shoot 45º (degree) down to Cats became the only subject that could be photographed without interrogation — the only presence that allowed the photographer to remain invisible. The title Absolute refers to this condition of total limitation: one remaining possibility among countless impossibilities.

The project is therefore not about cats themselves, nor about animal portraiture. Rather, the 116 photographed cats function as witnesses to a specific political and psychological atmosphere. They mark the boundaries of what could still be seen, recorded, and carried across borders.

The material form of the work is central to its meaning. Initial photographs were made using a thermal-paper camera, but the visibility of the device generated further attention. The artist later shifted to an iPhone, printing images onto used receipt paper collected from shops and streets. This strategy allowed the photographs to circulate unnoticed among ordinary commercial waste when leaving Iran. The receipts retain fragments of Farsi text, prices, numbers, and traces of daily transactions — accidental documents of inflation, economy, and urban life. Millions printed on the paper echo the distorted scale of economic reality, while the images themselves remain fragile, temporary, and easily erasable.

Absolute: Tehran Cats ultimately reflects on photography as an act of survival. It examines how an artist adapts when visibility becomes dangerous, and how images continue to exist under conditions designed to prevent their making.