Between Silence & Exposure by Kamran Ashtary
Spanning over three decades, the project brings together three interconnected bodies of work—Travellers, Chador, and Connecting Memories. Shot entirely in the studio, these portraits and still lives explore what remains when language fails: the gaze, the gesture, the object quietly carried across borders.
Kamran Ashtary began photographing shortly after leaving Iran, first in Amsterdam and later in New York City. His early portraits were made in unfamiliar spaces, using available light and instinct. The studio became a site of reckoning—a place not only to look but to listen. The people he photographed were fellow travelers through dislocation, doubt, and transformation.
At the center of this work are the objects—some photographed, others simply present in the room. A mother’s chador. A suitcase. A piece of lace. These are not props. They are witnesses. They carry the weight of histories both personal and collective.
This is not a linear narrative. It is a circle of return.
The images do not explain.
They remember.
