09/18/2026
Portraits of Homa sarshar
📸 Saeid Kaveh
Some portraits are about appearance. Others are about presence, history, and character.
Photographing Homa Sarshar meant portraying a woman whose voice has been part of Iranian journalism and cultural life for more than five decades. A journalist, author, broadcaster, and advocate whose journey has carried her from Iran to Los Angeles, while continuing to document the stories of women, human rights, minorities, and the Iranian diaspora.
For this series, I wanted the photography to reveal more than one side of her character.
We created several distinct looks, pairing her beautiful wardrobe and personal props with different lighting setups. From stronger, more sculptural light to softer and more elegant frames, each setup was carefully designed to reflect a different dimension of her personality: strength and resilience, sophistication and femininity, intelligence, warmth, and her wonderful sense of humor.
Her beautiful hair and makeup, styling, expressions, and the objects she brought into the frame all became part of the visual language. My role behind the camera was to bring those elements together using light, composition, direction, and mood to tailor each portrait specifically to the woman in front of my lens.
The result is not simply one portrait of Homa Sarshar, but a series of interpretations of a remarkable woman whose strength and femininity can exist beautifully within the same frame.
It was a privilege to photograph a woman who has spent a lifetime telling the stories of others and, for a moment, to tell her story through light.
