Since cutting her teeth as a photojournalist in her native Iran, Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar has moved on to a fine art practice that blurs the line between documentary and staged photography. Her images—which have been inspired by poetry and local myth, as well as the plight of asylum-seekers and whistleblowers—tell the stories of the people and places she captures, while hiding deeper narratives related to identity, marginality, and displacement. Hoda’s haunting portrait of the Kurdish-Iranian writer and refugee Behrouz Boochani won the prestigious Bowness photography prize in 2018, and she has exhibited extensively across Australia. We talked to Hoda about the impact of leaving home to live in Australia and how this has shaped her views on Iran.
Stories with Hoda Afshar