These photographs are inspired by the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, a mid-century Iranian poetess who died at age 32. The book represents a dialogue between my photography and her poetry, a lyrical love letter from my teenage self to Forugh.

I first came to the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad as a teenager in Iran, shortly after a college student that was housing in our home committed suicide. She was in love with a man that her parents had disapproved. Her death defined my adolescent years. As many young adults I dwelt in dark thoughts romanticizing the macabre. In Forugh’s verses I found a language unknown to me before, a language of dark desires and poignant melancholy. Love and desire, anxiety and fear, loneliness and death, and the relationships between them all were exotic landscapes in which I imagined myself. The verses of her poetry resonated inside my anxious, restless mind. Forty years since leaving Iran I find myself returning to the verses of Farrokhzad, stumbling over her words in my now broken Farsi. This time, however, I am experiencing her poetry as an adult and a physician who has come to know death intimately. I have become an exile, and the lines of Forugh’s poems spin a silken bridge from me to Iran.

Poets have used bird, mirror, lake, night, water, fish, moon, and sun as symbols to convey their search for mysticism, reality, and true self. In these photographs, I used some of the same symbols as metaphor for human form, mood, and emotions. Each photograph is not a translation of a line or stanza of Farrokhzad’s verses but a visceral response to her poetry through reflection on my adolescent years. Her poems continue to resonate with me and guide my vision, while sculpting the landscape of my mind- a landscape haunted by melancholic beauty and loneliness and populated with birds who traverse the membrane of dreams and reality.