What Becomes Visible

A Walk with Mehrdad Naraghi

Hadi Nasiri

In late fall of 2024, on a rainy afternoon around 2pm, Mehrdad and I entered Prospect Park from the east side through Garfield Street. The park was not empty, but it felt thinned out. Rain had flattened the soundscape. The paths were slick, the trees stripped back, the light already dull with that early winter reluctance New York specializes in. We began walking without urgency. The city remained around us, softened at the edges. Wet branches blurred the distance. Even before we started talking, the afternoon had already arranged itself like one of his photographs: withheld, compressed, not fully granting depth.

That is where I want to begin.

Not because Prospect Park explains Tehran, but because something in that walk arrived before language. The air had already organized perception. The scene was already thinking.

The city in The City does not arrive cleanly. It hesitates. What should be skyline appears as a thin, uncertain band, buildings barely separating themselves from the air. In one frame, a tower rises but never quite detaches from the haze around it; in another, the horizon dissolves before it can fully form. The atmosphere does not sit on top of the city. It works through it. The image compresses. Distance feels negotiated away, as if space itself has been quietly confiscated.

It would be easy to call this pollution. The word is ready, almost comforting in its familiarity. But the greyness resists that explanation. It is too consistent, too embedded to belong only to accident.

When I ask Mehrdad what produces this condition, he answers without hesitation.

“Poor governance produces this pollution, both literal and atmospheric. It is not only the contamination of air, but the accumulation of pressure imposed by a tyrannical system. Remove that force, and the image collapses entirely.”

He is not describing an image. He is describing the condition that makes the image possible.

“A system that seeks dominance does not want to be seen,” he continues. “Yet its effects become so pervasive that visibility becomes unavoidable. It reveals itself despite its own efforts to remain hidden.”

The contradiction lingers. Power withdraws, but its traces thicken. The skyline flattens. Architecture turns uncertain, almost provisional. Entire districts dissolve into a uniform field where nothing asserts itself fully.

Somewhere in the distance, a mountain edge presses through the haze, faint, incomplete, as if the landscape is trying to remember itself.

Nothing is missing. And yet something refuses to arrive.

As we move toward Dog Beach, the rain softens. The water is restless but not dramatic. Dogs keep running into and out of it with the kind of confidence only animals and empire seem to possess. We are already talking, but what stays is not a sentence. It is a pressure. The grey water, the low sky, and his insistence that what appears atmospheric is often administrative.

I press him on the work.

“Art does not necessarily offer safety,” he says. “It can disturb. The work functions as a document… but also as a confrontation.”

Then, quieter:

“A record of what it felt like.”

But feeling here is not private. It is distributed, environmental, infrastructural.

He pauses, then shifts the ground.

“I had an experience while showing The City in Tehran. Many viewers told me they felt suffocated just by looking at the photographs. It was striking that they felt more suffocated by seeing the reality they live in than by living it every day.”

The sentence stays between us.

“I think that is the power of the image,” he adds. “It forces you to confront what you already inhabit.”

And something fractures there.

If the image intensifies the condition more than life itself, then what exactly is it doing?

Is it revealing something hidden, or producing another layer of pressure, one that belongs to the act of seeing itself?

The photograph holds what life cannot. Once produced, it leaves. It enters galleries, publications, institutions. It travels.

“But that’s the problem too,” he says. “It survives in places where the condition doesn’t.”

What travels is not clarity. It is something closer to obstruction, carried outward, reorganized, made available.

Even here, the structure exceeds the regime. The Islamic Republic produces the immediate force, but that force sits within a wider arrangement. Sanctions, financial exclusions, regional interests, geopolitical calculations all gather around the same atmosphere.

I ask if that structure stops at the border.

“Power doesn’t stay contained,” he says. “It shifts form. But it keeps organizing what becomes visible.”

Near the waterfall, the walk changes tempo. The path narrows, and the sound of falling water thickens the conversation rather than interrupting it. The park remains intact, but something folds inward. The city recedes. The body comes forward.

“If the city cannot hold,” Mehrdad says, “the body does not escape that condition.”

The faces in The People persist, but uncertainly. Eyes appear, then soften. Mouths form without fully holding expression. A cheek dissolves into surrounding darkness. In some images, the face seems to slide out of itself, its boundaries unstable. In one portrait, the head remains frontal, but the features drift; in another, a slight turn leaves less an outline than a residue.

“This is not style,” he says. “It is a gradual fading.”

“People lose their sense of identity and dignity to the point where even self-recognition becomes uncertain.”

Dignity is not internal. It depends on being registered socially, politically, structurally. When that recognition fails, dignity does not collapse dramatically. It thins. It withdraws. It is administratively erased.

“Repression deprives you of your identity and dignity to the point that you lose your ability to express yourself,” he says, “because you no longer know who you are.”

The body remains present. The structure no longer responds.

“A person becomes structurally invisible when their desires and demands are no longer acknowledged… their presence ceases to matter.”

Recognition shifts. Not refusal, but irrelevance.

“They have already been removed from the equation,” he continues. “Eventually, invisibility becomes something you carry.”

The blur does not sit on the surface. It settles into the body.

We keep walking. The trees thin unevenly. Not gone. Not present. Half-retreated.

“There is still movement,” he says. “They still want to believe they can act.”

Then, quieter:

“But each time resistance is suppressed, something wears down.”

Action erupts. It is contained. It leaves exhaustion.

“But they still try,” he adds. “That’s the part people don’t see.”

Another fracture opens.

If invisibility becomes internalized, if the body begins to inhabit its own erasure, what does it mean to photograph it?

Is the image resisting that disappearance?

Or does it risk stabilizing it, fixing it into a form that can be seen, circulated, even understood, without altering the condition itself?

The faces remain.

But what do they become once they leave?

As we move upward, the path opens slightly. Distance returns, but not fully. The afternoon remains undecided.

“When visibility and identity fail to stabilize,” Mehrdad says, “time begins to follow.”

The images hover. Faces seem caught mid-transition, but the transition never completes.

“A nation caught between past and future… between fight and fatigue… lingering in a limbo of expectation… where survival has become the only revolution.”

Limbo is not delay. It is maintenance.

“Everything is delayed,” he says. “Change, collapse, confrontation.”

Time cycles. Tension accumulates. Collapse is absorbed. Then it resets.

“Waiting becomes the only option… often waiting for something irrational.”

Not because people are naïve.

Because reality has stopped offering usable alternatives.

Hope is not removed. It is calibrated.

“The system maintains just enough possibility… Even ‘almost’ becomes something you hold onto.”

When I press him on what happens if hope disappears entirely, he answers without pause:

“Like in my portraits, people would turn into images—images of the deceased, a remembrance.”

Not death as event.

Something slower.

Something that resembles persistence without agency.

Near the Boathouse, the park shifts again, but not only atmospherically. The structure itself carries a history that no longer aligns with its function. It once held boats, movement, passage across water. Now it hosts weddings, dinners, curated gatherings, events designed to stage intimacy, formalize presence, and convert encounter into arrangement. The transformation is quiet, almost polite, but it marks something larger: the replacement of use by presentation. What once facilitated movement now organizes appearance.

Standing there, it becomes difficult to read the space as neutral. The building feels less like architecture than choreography already hardened into form. Bodies arrive already anticipated by the structure waiting for them. Even celebration seems pre-scripted. The Boathouse no longer holds transition. It holds presentation.

That shift matters because Rehearsals is not really about freedom. At least not directly. It is about what happens to the body after fear loosens its grip, after visibility stops functioning primarily as punishment. The pressure has changed shape. It has not disappeared.

In Rehearsals, bodies occupy open space. They stand apart, gather loosely, lie down as if caught between instruction and rest. A figure bends toward light near the edge of a field, but the gesture feels slightly overextended, as though openness itself has become something the body must consciously learn. In another image, someone reclines on the grass with apparent ease, yet one arm remains tense against the ground, refusing full surrender to the posture it performs. Elsewhere, a group gathers at dusk. Their closeness suggests intimacy, but their spacing remains strangely calibrated, each body preserving a small perimeter around itself, as if spontaneity has already been edited before arrival.

In one photograph, a man smiles toward someone outside the frame, but the smile arrives a fraction too early, holding itself in place before the emotion fully catches up to it. The expression lingers strangely afterward, continuing for a moment after the interaction itself seems to have already disappeared. As if the face has learned the timing of visibility more precisely than the feeling underneath it.

Nothing in the photographs fully settles.

Even relaxation appears rehearsed.

“They can be seen without fear,” Mehrdad says.

That matters.

In Tehran, visibility arrives with consequence. The body learns caution. Gesture contracts before it fully emerges. Expression calculates itself against danger. Here, the body expands differently. Limbs stretch outward. Faces turn toward the camera instead of away from it. Distance between bodies becomes negotiable rather than enforced. He gestures outward while saying this, toward the open park itself, as if freedom were still something spatial he was testing for stability.

But the relief does not last long.

“They are still performing,” he says.

And almost immediately, before the sentence can harden into accusation, he complicates it.

“The act of performance, especially in this context, embodies self-exposure, expression, and revelation. Even if they are performing freedom, it is still a sign of freedom.”

He says this carefully, almost protectively, as though trying to rescue performance from being mistaken for falseness. To him, performance is not the opposite of sincerity. A body performing confidence is still radically different from a body prevented from expression entirely. The distinction matters because repression and performance may both organize behavior, but they do not organize it through the same violence.

“As I said,” he continues, “the act of performance—especially in this context—embodies self-exposure, expression, and revelation. So even if it is self-performance, it still carries these qualities. Repression, on the other hand, deprives you of your identity and dignity to the point that you lose your ability to express yourself, because you no longer know who you are.”

That last sentence folds backward through the entire essay. Suddenly the grayness of The City and the fading faces of The People return here in another form. Grayness is no longer only atmospheric. It becomes behavioral. Temporal. Existential.

“It is a matter of time,” he says. “When you live under a dictatorship for decades, your boldness gradually fades into a kind of grayness. In contrast, living in a free society for years gives you the confidence to express yourself.”

Time enters the body again.

Not historical time.

Lived time.

Repeated time.

Time sedimented into posture.

The figures in Rehearsals are not simply behaving differently because they crossed a border. They are inhabiting another temporal structure entirely. One where the body no longer calculates every gesture against immediate punishment. One where visibility can become experimentation rather than exposure to danger.

And yet the work refuses to romanticize this shift. That refusal is what gives the series its instability. Because visibility here is not neutral either.

The more I stay with these photographs, the harder it becomes to separate freedom from legibility. The bodies appear relaxed, but they also appear aware of appearing. They occupy space, but they do so within a visual vocabulary already familiar to contemporary urban life: leisure, individuality, spontaneity, intimacy, self-expression. Even refusal risks becoming recognizable style.

And somewhere inside that realization, the distance between the photographs and the viewer begins to collapse.

Because these images are no longer only about Iran. Or exile. Or migration. They begin touching something wider and more difficult to isolate: the possibility that contemporary subjectivity itself has become inseparable from rehearsal.

Not only the subjects in the photographs.

Us too.

The way we speak in public.

The way we arrange loneliness into visibility.

The way intimacy now arrives already half-aware of being documented.

The way sincerity increasingly resembles a performance of sincerity.

Even while writing this, I can feel the essay rehearsing its own intelligence, arranging uncertainty into readable form, converting proximity into structure before the thought has fully arrived. And the strange part is that I cannot fully tell where the performance begins. The sentences continue behaving after intention drops away from them. The argument keeps holding its posture. Even now, while trying to describe rehearsal, I can feel myself adjusting rhythm, calibrating vulnerability, shaping uncertainty into something legible enough to survive being read.

The text is not outside the mechanism it describes.

It is moving inside it.

And perhaps that is why these photographs become difficult to stand outside of for very long. The longer I stay with them, the more artificial my own distance begins to feel. Observation itself starts becoming unstable. Criticism begins resembling another performance of clarity. Even self-awareness no longer guarantees escape from the structure producing it.

Not that performance hides identity.

But that identity itself may now emerge through endless performance, until the distinction between the two begins to lose stability.

When I ask whether these roles are truly chosen by individuals, or shaped by another, softer structure of control, Mehrdad shifts immediately toward media and ideology.

“Through the dominance of media and society, individualism is limited in favor of collective success,” he says. “This is especially visible in the United States, where a national narrative—such as the ‘American Dream’—is promoted, even though dreaming itself is the most individual human capacity.”

That sentence widens the frame beyond Iran entirely. Dreaming itself begins to sound infrastructural. Even imagination no longer arrives untouched. Desire enters already formatted by visibility, aspiration, recognition.

Not:

this is who you must become.

But:

this is what becoming should look like.

And maybe that is why the photographs feel quietly exhausting. The bodies are no longer hiding from power. They are learning how to remain legible within it.

“In the series I created in Iran,” Mehrdad says, “I—consciously or unconsciously—chose the language of symbolism: nature in The Fairyland series and pollution in The City series. I say ‘unconsciously’ because when you live under the constant threat of expressing yourself, you gradually begin to self-censor, even while believing you are acting out of your own free will.”

That sentence lingers differently here.

Because suddenly repression no longer appears only as prohibition. It enters earlier than that. Earlier than speech. Earlier than decision. The self begins editing itself before power visibly arrives.

And perhaps that is why the photographs never fully resolve into freedom either.

One figure stands illuminated while others recede into darkness, as if visibility itself has detached from the bodies moving through it and begun selecting subjects independently. Elsewhere, bodies gather together but fail to fully cohere into relation. A reclining figure appears almost theatrical, suspended between exhaustion and pose. In another frame, someone smiles with a kind of excessive softness, the expression lingering just slightly too long, as though comfort itself has become conscious of being seen.

The photographs keep returning to the same uncertainty:

whether the body is expressing itself, or learning how to become readable within another system of expectations.

If freedom depends on visibility, what happens when visibility itself becomes compulsory?

The images never resolve the question.

They linger between liberation and choreography, between expression and adaptation, between arrival and rehearsal.

That word rehearsal becomes heavier the longer I stay with the work.

A rehearsal traditionally points toward a future event. It assumes completion somewhere ahead. But here the performance never fully arrives. The bodies remain caught inside preparation itself.

Rehearsal stops functioning as transition.

It becomes condition.

The figures are not rehearsing for freedom.

They are rehearsing survival within visibility itself.

And perhaps that is why the photographs remain unsettling long after the immediate politics recede from view. Nothing appears overtly violent here. No police. No collapsing skyline. No suffocating air.

And yet pressure remains everywhere.

Just reorganized.

Just softened.

Just intimate enough to become difficult to name.

The body survives repression by learning caution.

It survives visibility by learning performance.

Both leave traces.

“Distance offers a clearer view of my culture,” Mehrdad says later, as we begin walking back through the rain. “At the same time, it has an anchoring quality in moments of feeling lost, so I hold on to it as a way of keeping myself from falling apart.”

The sentence lands quietly, but it reorganizes everything before it.

Because beneath all the theory of visibility and performance, something more fragile has been moving through the work all along: a body trying to remain recognizable to itself while passing through different systems of appearance.

And perhaps that is why none of the bodies ever fully arrive.
After a while, it becomes impossible to tell whether the body is performing visibility, or whether visibility has already begun performing the body.