Folding Patterns

A photographic series reflecting on memory, migration and survival. The work draws from my early childhood as a refugee in Athens, Greece. These quiet, tactile images transform everyday materials into intimate recordings displacement, care and resilience.

I was a refugee in Athens, Greece during the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s. These photographs are fragments of my life during my family's time there. I was a child then, displaced from Tehran, caught in the quiet fragments of a world that was breaking.
For the first two weeks, we lived in an old hotel, sharing a kitchen with twenty-two other families. It was just a stop until my father and his friend found basement apartments in Voula, a town that hadn't yet become what it is today. None of it was familiar.
I was between four and six years old. While my father worked, my Mother and I collected cardboard from the streets to sell. Sometimes, my mother would find paper patterns and fabric, and she'd use them to make dress shirts for my father to wear to work. Those patterns were always on the table-like a quiet ritual, never rushed, always present. I didn't speak much then. It wasn't out of shyness, but a kind of stillness, as if I didn't need words to understand what was happening.
Then, one day, without warning, we were sent to Vancouver, B.C. We took the patterns with us. And they stayed with me.
The large format photographs in this collection are details of those patterns, and the layers between cardboard boxes-the lines and creases between card­board and fabric, worn, folded, time-worn. There's something about the texture of these things-patterns for blue-collar shirts, the kind that come from brands like McCalls or Simplicity-that feels like a quiet record of movement, of settlement, of the body carrying a memory.
These hand toned silver gelatin prints-are not just photographs. They are a reflection of how we hold onto things, even after everything chang­es. The layers of cardboard and the patterns beneath are small marks of a story - the story of migration, resilience, of starting over.