Women behind the lens: ‘After state massacres, I began burning the prints as an act of mourning’

Iranian visual journalist Parisa Azadi set her images alight in response to January’s violent repression by the regime, not to erase them, but to convey ‘rage, grief and refusal’

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n September 2022, as revolution spread across Iran, I witnessed it from Dubai through the unstable glow of phone screens. Raw videos surfaced daily before disappearing into internet blackouts: women burning their hijabs, young men wounded by metal pellets, teenagers dragged into unmarked vans.

Unable to return safely to Iran, where I had spent six years documenting life under repression, I felt helpless. This work emerged from that pain and is both testimony and absence: the public violence of the state and my private, long-distance bearing witness.

Using open-source protest footage, I began isolating frames from videos circulating on social media and photographing them directly from my computer with a Fujifilm instax camera, which can produce prints immediately. I wanted to interrupt the relentless flow of digital images – to arrest their movement, turning ephemeral pixels into solid physical objects.