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Farzin Azarm: Daydreamings
I was born in Tehran, and I still live in this city. I began photographing seriously in 2018. At the beginning, my practice was entirely self-taught and experimental. During this period, without trying to work within any particular genre, I focused solely on the act of photographing itself, capturing the simplest moments around me. Later, in 2021, I entered the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, where I pursued a B.A. in Photography. Studying at the university gave my photographic process a more rigorous form and helped shape what is often called “thinking through images” into something more structured for me.
Farzin Azarm
“Daydreamings” emerged out of the years I spent wandering Tehran—aimlessly, unhurriedly—allowing the city to reveal itself in those fleeting moments that usually go unnoticed. Places that were neither destinations nor points of pause; margins suspended between noise and emptiness.
It was within these in-between spaces that the city gradually turned into a mental landscape—one neither entirely real nor entirely imagined, something between wakefulness and the brief drift of a midday dream.
For me, this series is a narration of moments of suspension; moments in which the city discloses itself not through its forms and structures but through the tension that courses between them. These photographs attempt to capture not the city’s vista but a state of being within it—a state in which nature and architecture, light and darkness, rather than cancelling one another out, transform the world into a fleeting, unstable experience.
I was born in Tehran, and I still live in this city. I began photographing seriously in 2018. At the beginning, my practice was entirely self-taught and experimental. During this period, without trying to work within any particular genre, I focused solely on the act of photographing itself, capturing the simplest moments around me. Later, in 2021, I entered the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, where I pursued a B.A. in Photography. Studying at the university gave my photographic process a more rigorous form and helped shape what is often called “thinking through images” into something more structured for me.
Throughout my four years of study, I worked on several series dealing with themes such as “personal space,” “urban landscape,” “nature,” and “memory.” Most of these projects developed through an experimental approach, in which exploring the grammar of the medium often took precedence over the semantic layers of the work. Some remained at the level of photographic exercises, while others took on a more defined shape and were exhibited in various contexts—such as the series A Room of One’s Own (2023) at the 7th Annual Exhibition of the University of Tehran; the zines White Portraits and Inverse, presented at the Art Book Fair (2024); and the display of some of my photographs in two group exhibitions at Adapa Gallery (2023) and Emkan Gallery (2024).
A larger and more continuous part of my practice has been wandering through Tehran, something I have done for nearly five years and which holds deeper personal significance for me. Through these years of drifting, I gradually encountered a mental and atemporal image of the city—a Tehran that, for me, is not merely a collection of streets and buildings, but a kind of “inner landscape”: one that is constructed in the mind, sedimented in memory, and appears in photographs as suspended and outside of time. This encounter became the point of departure for three bodies of work that I have been developing in recent years and continue to expand: Tehran Still Lifes, Daydreamings, and an Untitled series created as part of my undergraduate thesis.
