Zii - 2025

This series is a visual study of Iran’s Generation Z, photographed in and around Naqsh-e Jahan Square, a national heritage site in my hometown, Isfahan, Iran. Once an imperial arena and now a social crossroads, the square has always played a vital role in the city’s life. I portrayed how a generation raised under sanctions and surveillance inhabits this space of history and symmetry and how they make it their own.

Growing up beside my younger brother, who belongs to this generation, gave me a window into their world, a vision of freedom shaped through connectivity. I was born only a few years before the line that marks Gen Z, yet I often feel a decade older. The distance between us lies not in time but in the texture of experience: fashion, language, music, and a shifting sense of possibility.

Iran’s Gen Z moves between visibility and constraint. They live with unstable internet access, censorship, and the economic pressure of sanctions and inflation. Their lives are shaped by mandatory laws, the hijab for women, and military service for men. They have witnessed protests and war, carrying anxiety, grief, and uncertainty about their future. Some working on leaving; some already have. For many, the future feels suspended between hope and exhaustion.

Many came of age during Woman, Life, Freedom in 2022. That awareness lingers in their posture and style, in how they claim the present despite uncertainty. The architecture endures, and so do they.

These photographs are not documents of protest but portraits of endurance, youth standing in dialogue with place, memory, and the fragile idea of freedom beneath the smoky sky of Iran in 2025.