Parastoo

"Day 594 of my new life in France." Parastoo, an Iranian student in Paris, keeps count. On her phone: protests, arrests, executions. A body at peace, a mind held hostage by the country she left behind.

Parastoo left Iran in 2024 to study in France. She did not flee a war. The war came after her.

Within months, the Iranian currency collapsed, connections between Iran and France were severed, and her family could no longer support her. She has not seen them in over two years. An engineer in Iran, she now studies geography in France and works as a babysitter, caring for other people's children while separated from her own family.

On 8 and 9 January 2026, as the Iranian authorities shut down the internet, she sat her final exams at the Sorbonne without knowing whether her parents were alive.

When she arrived in France, people confused Iran with Iraq. Now they know it largely as a country at war.

Images of Iran today circulate as ruins, crowds and missiles. This series refuses that repetition. It stays with one woman as she moves through her ordinary days. She still swims, as she has since the age of three, and now teaches children in Paris. I made these photographs over the course of a summer, as Parastoo and I became friends.

Parastoo is not the war waged over her country.