Ordinary Grief is a story of tenuous reconciliation. In 2017, I returned to Iran after 25 years of self-exile, where I embarked on a personal and political reclamation of my identity and history. With images spanning 2017-2022, Ordinary Grief is my attempt to reconcile despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. It’s about ordinary Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds. It’s a love letter to a country from which I feel estranged, despite having been born there, and to the people who call it home.
As a woman who grew up between East and West, straddling the line between insider and outsider, my experiences are difficult, unromantic, and fragile. I’ve realized that two decades of living outside Iran brought with them a kind of cultural and personal amnesia. Ordinary Grief is also about what it means to forget and what it means to (try to) remember. Always, I’m attuned to joy, despite the hardships: I sought moments of serenity, celebration, and ritual in the shadows of perpetual grief. The photographs mark the passage of time as they document physical, emotional, and political limbo: they question what it means to long and to belong.
Parisa Azad
Parisa Azadi (1986, Iran) is an Iranian-Canadian visual journalist whose work is grounded in themes of systematic violence, social injustice, and radical resistance within historically oppressed communities. 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, missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and religious extremism in Bangladesh. Since 2017, Parisa has been working in Iran, examining the nuanced dynamics of communities living in the aftermath of political violence.
Parisa’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the U.S., including Cortona On The Move, Belfast Festival, the American Center For Photographers, Melike Bilir Gallery, among others. Her work has been recognized by the World Press Photo 6×6 Global Talent Program and the Chris Hondros Fund Award. In 2023, Parisa was named one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch, received the Magnum Foundation Mobility Grant, and joined the South Asia Incubator Program. Her photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Courrier International, Annabelle Magazine, among others.
www.parisaphotography.com
@parisa_images
