Kamran Ashtary is an Amsterdam-based visual artist. His work moves between memory, exile, and the quiet spaces where identity resists erasure. Born in Iran, Kamran’s photographs are rooted in presence: marked by stillness, intimacy, and the unsaid.
Educated in Tehran, Amsterdam, and New York City, including at the Rietveld Academy and The Cooper Union, his early studio portraits emerged during years of personal transition, shaped by migration and silence. He works with light, fabric, and objects: many of them carried with him since leaving Iran. A mother’s chador. A suitcase. A mirror. These are not symbols. They are witnesses.
Kamran’s projects unfold over decades, often returning to earlier work with new eyes. His book Between Silence and Exposure traces three bodies of work—Travellers, Chador, and Connecting Memories—weaving together portraits and still lives to reflect a long process of reckoning and remembering.
He is not interested in spectacle. He is interested in what endures.
Kamran’s work has been exhibited and published internationally, and he continues to teach, write, and reflect on the power of images to hold what history cannot always carry.