Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual journalist and storyteller with a keen interest in history and conflict, memory and displacement. Born in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, she fled to Canada with her family at the age of eight, leaving behind a life shaped by oppression. Yet in Canada, the world was no kinder. From a young age, she found herself grappling with xenophobia and a deep-seated shame about her identity. This struggle for belonging, and her desire for absolute freedom, became a lifelong pursuit, one she has never abandoned.
Photography eventually became her passport to freedom. Although it came to her later in life, it felt like a natural extension of her childhood spent navigating chaos and control. The survival instinct she learned early on, whether finding an exit door or adapting to hostile environments, proved to be an invaluable skill in her work as a photojournalist.
Parisa has reported across the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Canada, covering civil unrest and state repression- including the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, religious extremism in Bangladesh, and the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.
Her most recent body of work, Ordinary Grief, marks her return to Iran after twenty-five years of exile. It is both a personal and political reclamation of her identity and history. As a woman who has lived between East and West, constantly straddling the line between insider and outsider, she describes her experience as “difficult, unromantic, and fragile.”
This personal series is a slow, poetic exploration of life in Iran between 2017 and 2022. Unable to work as a traditional photojournalist in a country where even basic freedoms are policed, Parisa turned her lens toward the quiet moments of everyday life. The result is a collection of lyrical images that convey the subdued sorrow of people whose destinies are not their own. She captures the spaces in between- finding traces of grief in a fleeting glance or the slump of a shoulder- but also moments of joy and quiet resistance.
“I’m always attuned to joy, despite the hardships,” she says. “I seek out memories of serenity, celebration, and ritual in the shadows of perpetual grief.”
This slow, nuanced approach allows her to engage in a deeply personal dialogue with her audience. Her work also captures the gradual crumbling of the metaphorical walls that once forced people to seek joy and freedom in private. Her camera bears witness to small, public acts of rebellion – a unmarried couple embracing, girls in bathing suits -moments that were once unimaginable.
What moved me most during our conversation was her passion and her unwavering commitment to photography above all else. For Parisa, photography is more than a career – it is a solitary, all-consuming pursuit. Not just a craft, but a way of being.
How did your photographic journey begin, and what first drew you to the medium?
Ever since I can remember, I was drawn to images of world events on TV. In 1990, when a devastating earthquake struck northern Iran, I was five years old, watching the destruction unfold on the TV screen at home in Tehran. My immediate reaction was frustration- an urge to see it in person, to know what it felt and sounded like beyond the television.
I’m not sure why, at that age, I was drawn to destruction and tragedy. Maybe it’s because I was born in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war and grew up surrounded by black-and-white images of young men fighting on the frontlines. Or because my cousins and I drew colourful pictures of tanks, rifles, and bleeding bodies as if it were an ordinary part of life. Maybe it was because the streets themselves often felt like war zones. Or maybe it was the endless television sermons, stories of divine victory, and images of martyred soldiers framed as holy heroes. Those images blurred the line between truth and fabrication, and I grew up with a lingering sense that what I was seeing wasn’t the full story.
I was never certain to what degree my identity would figure into my work. My life in photography officially began in New Orleans at age 21 when I went there to volunteer with a relief organization after Hurricane Katrina. I had romanticized my future- imagining a life as a humanitarian worker in disaster zones. At the same time, I carried a cheap Canon Rebel camera, excited by the possibility of photojournalism. Around that time, I discovered the work of photojournalists like Don McCullin, Stanley Greene, and Susan Meiselas- those who documented conflict and the everyday struggles of communities living in the shadow of violence. The film ‘War Photographer’, about James Nachtwey, showed me the discipline and responsibility behind documenting history, and that a life committed to witnessing global events was possible.
While helping rebuild homes for families who had lost everything, I witnessed devastation far beyond what appeared in headlines: a mother in tears after being scammed by contractors, construction sites left half-finished and abandoned, young men numbed by addiction after being torn from their communities. I began to see the limits of humanitarian work- the mismanagement of funds, the bureaucracy, the slow progress that sometimes didn’t reach those most in need.
I began photographing the communities where I was volunteering, drawn to the stories unfolding around me. The camera gave me a sense of urgency and purpose- a way to witness and document lives often left behind. Through photography, I felt a connection and sense of belonging as if the act of witnessing gave me a place in the world.
Looking back, I recognize that I was really searching for a way to move through the world on my own terms. Photography allowed me to look at the world through my own lens, to ask questions of it, to engage with it, to find my place in it. Photography is home in a way that neither Iran nor Canada can be.
I returned to New Orleans several times over the years, 2008 until 2014. Those trips gave me space to build my first body of work and begin shaping my own visual language that was rooted in empathy, integrity and truth-telling. That early experience marked the beginning of my career, but it also laid the foundation for how I see, how I connect, and how I make sense of the world.
Grief and memory recur as central themes in your photography. Working as a woman both within Iran and abroad, what unique challenges or perspectives have shaped your approach to these themes?
I had a sad and strange childhood in Iran, where school felt less like a centre for knowledge and more like an institution for obedience training. Home carried moments of innocence, but it was also heavily tainted with patriarchal subjugation and religious control. As the regime tightened its grip, religion became a tool of repression. The men in my life became more devout and domineering, and the women more withdrawn, hiding behind the walls of their homes or beneath black and muted colours in public. I grew up mourning a freedom I never knew in Iran.
Control, erasure, and grief became the lens through which I understood the world- what is violently taken away, what is erased, and how people resist and create meaning within an oppressive system.
Life in Iran is full of contradictions- joy and shame, expression and suppression, always intertwined. Over time, those tensions leave a mark both individually and collectively: a grief that lingers for what was lost and what could have been. And yet grief is also met with refusal: it is the ground from which resistance grows. People continue to reclaim their future, to build something new despite the hardship and pain.
In Iran, resistance takes many forms: girls in bright bathing suits baring their arms and legs on the beach, walking a dog through the streets, or simply touching someone you love in public. I find Iranians inspiring for their refusal to back down in the face of overwhelming odds- moving through public and private space, choosing to be seen, reclaiming autonomy in places designed to suppress them. They carry the full weight of what it means to live in Iran today.
Displacement and belonging are key themes in your work. How has your understanding of “home” evolved through the process of making this work?
When I first moved back to Iran, I became desperate to make Tehran a permanent home. I bought furniture and began decorating my apartment for the first time; something I hadn’t done in all my years of moving from place to place around the world.
But each attempt to settle and to create stability was met with violent interruption: political assassinations, internet blackouts, friends fleeing the country, and a growing paranoia surrounding my work.
By 2022, I began having recurring nightmares of being chased by security forces on the streets, and I stopped tending to the garden in my backyard. I thought to myself, I don’t want to put in all this effort to make the garden beautiful only to have it taken away. If I let it die, it will hurt less. Yet I don’t want to paint Iran as a dark, bleak place, because even in despair there is still so much joy and hope: moments of solidarity, resistance, and love that have sustained me and my work are also what I always remember and carry with me. Iranians continue to fight, prying open doors that once felt impossible to even approach only a few years ago. But it’s a crushing, wearisome kind of hope at times- a hope that always carries with it the shadow of grief of what’s been lost.
In time, I’ve accepted that this in-between state is permanent and it’s part of who I am. I’ve made my peace with it. I no longer expect to feel fully rooted. I’ve learned to find belonging in movement, in people, in work that connects me to both worlds.
You have spoken of your choice to remain unmarried and without children as an act of rebellion and a pursuit of freedom. How does this personal choice influence your perspective on womanhood and how is this reflected in your photography?
I choose to be childfree and not marry young so I can be free. I was born into a family of child marriages- both my grandmothers married at 13, my mother at 15. I grew up watching my cousins move from their father’s homes to their husband’s homes before they ever had a chance to live for themselves. In Canada, I saw those around me rushing into marriages and kids before they understood who they were. The idea of being legally tied to a man and building a life around routine and expectation felt suffocating to me.
Much of my childhood was spent in rebellion and resisting the traditions and religious expectations that confined the women around me. When I was 21, I made a vow to myself: to never stay in a situation I didn’t want to be in and to never build a life I couldn’t walk away from.
That defiance shaped the person and photographer I became. My work often centres women who live with the same quiet resistance, who create small openings for themselves within systems designed to contain them. The desire for freedom, my own and theirs, continues to guide everything I do. It feels fitting that my last name Azadi means “freedom” in Persian, as it carries the very concept that drives both my life and work.
When you returned to Iran, was there a particular encounter or photograph that challenged your expectations or altered your perspective?
Reflecting on the photographs in ‘Ordinary Grief’ now, I see the care that sustained people through impossible conditions: care between friends, care for the land, care for language, and care for each other’s safety and dignity. These were more than personal gestures; they were political acts- quiet, deliberate forms of resistance in a system designed to isolate, suppress, and erase.
Documenting that very powerful kind of care helped me process my own grief by pushing me to face the suffering directly, thereby showing me how true strength often comes from connection. Photography became a way to witness not just what was broken, but what endured.
And in doing so, my practice took shape in a kind of collective mirror: a reminder that even in the most repressive conditions, tenderness survives through quiet gestures that hold communities together in defiance. Survival in itself can offer the most radical form of healing.
In presenting your work to audiences worldwide, has any reaction, whether critical or supportive, led you to see your project differently?
My intention was always to show ‘Ordinary Grief’ in the southern states of the U.S., where there are deep misconceptions and limited understanding of Iran. The country often appears in the news through images and commentary of war, sanctions, and repression. Undoubtedly these are aspects of daily life, but Iranians also live full lives shaped by dreams, longing and mutual care, a reality rarely seen.
In 2023, I had the opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the American Centre for Photographers in North Carolina, curated by Jerome De Perlinghi. It was meaningful to share the work in person and speak about the stories behind the images directly with an audience. Many said it was the first time they had seen everyday realities in Iran- the affection shared between friends, the exhaustion of single motherhood, the quiet persistence of building a life under economic strain, the tenderness that endures despite it all.
Photographing the ordinary gives people an accessible point of entry into a world they know little about. So much of my work unfolds in long-form chapters, often in isolation for lengthy stretches of time, and with that comes doubt about whether it will connect or reach beyond its context. The response in North Carolina and across Europe showed me why the work matters and how these photographs speak to universal themes of connection, resistance, and the shared struggle for freedom. Audiences were drawn to stories that fell outside the orientalist and reductionist narratives that disregard the daily realities of Iranians.
I had the chance to share the stories of the people in the images in a deeper way. Zara for example, married at the young age of 19 to escape her overbearing father. Her husband turned out to be a violent addict. Despite conservative familial pressure not to divorce, she chose to become a strong single mother. So she spends a lot of her time at home and rarely goes out. This is her family’s way to hide the shame from the outside world. I was able to share what I saw in her: admirable tenacity and courage in the face of overwhelming odds and rigid social norms.
You have often acknowledged the role of mentors in your transition from photojournalism to personal visual storytelling. Is there a piece of advice that has most deeply influenced your approach?
Traveling and making work can be a very isolating endeavour. So much of our work as photojournalists is solitary. My colleagues and mentors are major creative influences as well as support systems. I feel so incredibly lucky to know all of them. They offer fresh perspectives and help me think through the gaps in my work.
Early in my career, a mentor told me to protect my well-being—take time off every six months to nurture myself and take care of my mental and physical health because they are the foundation that will sustain my work. I’ve never been good at following that advice, but I’m learning. For years, there was no separation between my life and my work. I was consumed by assignments, projects, and survival, and it made me unreliable in my personal life.
When I moved back to Iran, I had to adapt to a different way of life. Iranians tend to make more time for friends and family. Friendships are more affectionate, and people have a stronger sense of attachment to each other. This forced me to slow down and not feel like I constantly need to be working. My weeks are filled with spontaneous house parties, road trips, picnics, hikes in the mountains, and just random wanderings with friends around the city.
You have emphasized your use of colour, light and composition to counter the predominantly black and white portrayals of Iran in Western media. How do these visual decisions allow you to shift the narrative?
I use colour, light, and composition to show Iran’s true texture: the warmth of late afternoon light in Tehran, the golden tones of the desert around Kashan, the deep greens of Mazandaran, the pale blues of snow in the Alborz mountains. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran has often been portrayed as monochrome — a place defined by crisis, repression, and theocracy. Working in colour resists the dominant black-and-white imagery of Iran, which often flattens the emotional range of life there.
I’m also mindful of omitting images that play into clichés of Iran. Without careful sequencing, photographs of women in hijab, men praying, or protest crowds can be too easily read through the narrow lens the West often applies to the region. These images risk being misinterpreted or reduced, stripped of the complexity of everyday life. For me, the challenge is to work with colour, light, and sequence in a way that resists those easy tropes while staying true to what I saw and what we all lived.
More recently you have turned to film, sound, and text alongside photography. Can you share an example of how this has allowed you to express something that a single image could not?
Working as a photojournalist in Iran means learning to move carefully through systems designed to break you. Daily life is marked by violent interruptions that make photographing public life increasingly difficult. Each new crisis deepens the instability, forcing journalists to adapt and find new ways to continue working under constant censorship.
During the recent protests that erupted across the country, daily life became significantly more difficult. It was a time when staying united was essential, and showing solidarity with those risking everything by taking to the streets felt imperative. Friends were arrested, colleagues imprisoned, and reports of deaths began to resurface with frightening frequency.
Out of grief, I began photographing found video footage of political unrest on my computer screen with an Instax camera, turning fleeting digital files into physical keepsakes. This process grew from my years in Iran, where I always carried a Fujifilm Instax camera. I offered instant photographs to strangers who welcomed me into their homes, willing to be photographed. I called these images yadegari– “something to remember me by”- a keepsake, a souvenir. They were small tokens of appreciation, given without contact details, a way to protect myself and my sources. These instant film photographs became both gifts and records.
A shift from my usual practice of high-resolution, carefully composed photographs, these were imperfect images, yet they too are part of history. By turning digital fragments into physical instant prints, I created photographs that could be held, not deleted or censored. The images carry the raw unpolished reality of those days, the unspeakable terror and brutality that defined them.
Collaborating with composer and sound artist José Bautista, the film developed a visual and sonic language shaped by the near impossibility of photographing in public. It became a space where the instant photographs, archival videos, sound testimonies, and poetry came together to speak about the cost of freedom—the violence in the streets, and the quiet shifts within people themselves. The film brought the instant prints to life; it carried the breath and the screams of those days, the cracks in voices, the silence pressed between words, and the tremor that lingered in the air long after the moments passed.*
*The film is an ongoing process, and its first cut made its debut at Cortona On The Move Photo festival in Italy (2025 Edition)
Silvia Dona’