Amak Mahmoodian

Amak Mahmoodian was born in Isfahan, Iran, one of the great cultural capitals of the Persian world, a city of mosques, bridges, and bazaars that would remain a powerful presence in her imagination long after she left. She grew up within a culture that placed great value on poetry, craftsmanship, and visual beauty, but also one in which the lives of women were circumscribed by social and religious conventions that she would later explore and interrogate through her photographic work. In the early 2000s, she moved to the United Kingdom, settling in Bristol, where she studied photography and began to develop the distinctive practice that bridges documentary, found imagery, and personal narrative.

Mahmoodian's work is rooted in the experience of displacement — the condition of living between two cultures, two languages, two systems of understanding the self and the world. Her photographs and assembled images explore what it means to carry one country inside you while inhabiting another, and the particular forms of memory, longing, and reimagination that this condition produces. She works across a range of approaches, from straightforward documentary photography to the collection and reconfiguration of found photographs, vernacular images, and archival material, often combining these different registers within a single project to create layered, poetic narratives that resist easy categorisation.

Her breakthrough project, Snjor, published as a photobook in 2019 by MACK Books, brought her international recognition and established her as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary photography dealing with questions of identity, gender, and cultural memory. The project takes its title from the Icelandic word for "snow" and centres on a collection of found photographs that Mahmoodian discovered in a flea market in Isfahan. The photographs, dating from the mid-twentieth century, show Iranian women in private settings — unveiled, relaxed, often playful — images that stand in stark contrast to the public representation of women in post-revolutionary Iran. Mahmoodian combined these found images with her own photographs and with passages of text to create a work that is at once a meditation on the hidden lives of Iranian women, a reflection on the nature of photographic memory, and a personal reckoning with the culture she left behind.

What makes Snjor so distinctive is its refusal to treat the found photographs as simple historical documents. Mahmoodian approaches them instead as fragments of a lost world, as evidence of lives lived in defiance of the constraints that would later be imposed upon them, and as mirrors in which she sees reflections of her own experience. The juxtaposition of found and original images, of past and present, of Iran and England, creates a visual conversation that is rich in ambiguity and emotional resonance. The book was widely praised for its formal innovation and emotional depth, and it won the Kassel Dummy Award before its publication.

Beyond Snjor, Mahmoodian has pursued a broader documentary practice that engages with the immigrant communities and marginal spaces of contemporary Britain. Her photographs of everyday life in Bristol and other British cities bring the same sensitivity and attention to cultural nuance that characterises her Iranian work, revealing the quiet dramas of displacement, adaptation, and belonging that play out in kitchens, living rooms, and on the streets of immigrant neighbourhoods. Her work insists that the personal is political, and that the intimate, domestic scale of experience is where the larger forces of history, migration, and cultural identity are most acutely felt.

Mahmoodian's practice also encompasses teaching and mentoring, and she has been an active presence in the British photography community, contributing to workshops, festivals, and educational programmes. She studied at the University of the West of England and has continued to develop her work through residencies and collaborations that extend the reach and ambition of her practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in several collections. She represents a growing generation of photographers whose work draws on the experience of migration and cultural hybridity to create images that speak to the universal conditions of memory, belonging, and the search for home.