"Afsaneh": Woman's Life in Passport Photos

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week we are publishing a series of “Afsaneh” by British photographer Ali Mobasser, in which he captured the life course of his beloved aunt in her photographs from documents - from school certificates and driving licenses to passports and travel tickets.

I never thought about being a photographer. Even at the university he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts and always considered himself an artist who only uses photography as a means. At the same time, I don’t mind when someone calls me a photographer, even if it usually follows the question of whether I’m shooting weddings.

This project is part of a large series dedicated to my beloved aunt Afsaneh. She and I were very close. When I was only eight years old, my mother sent me to live in London with my father Afshin and his sister Afsaneh. My aunt selflessly raised and raised me all the following years, in parallel, taking care of my grandfather and father and working full time in the office. She looked after all of us and never asked for anything in return. She never married and did not give birth to her own children. When I started to live separately, and my grandfather died, the Afsaneh relationship with my father went wrong, so that for some time they lived under the same roof as strangers. She suffered from loneliness and every year more and more depressed. Afsaneh died suddenly in the summer of 2013 from a stroke, she was only 56 years old. I was pained by the loss, I was crushed and angry at the same time and I set out to preserve her memory as long as possible, so I began working on the Afsaneh project almost immediately.

As soon as she was gone, I began to arrive at my father's house while he was at work, and photograph her room. It lasted for about half a year, it was akin to therapy for me and helped me to come to terms with the loss better than anything. I tried to capture her spirit and to preserve as long as possible the feeling that she was still there, with us. However, I worked on two other projects. One of them is a series of photos of her clothes and the contents of her purse, which were returned to us in the hospital after the death of Afsaneh. The second project (exactly you see it below. - Approx. Editors) appeared quite by accident: in the boxes of things I found a whole collection of old documents and aunt's identity cards, including passports and school certificates. All that was required was to take a picture of this find by laying out the documents in the correct order. I supplemented the collection with its latest ID - a travel ticket that was in Afsaneh’s purse on the day she died. And I decided that I wanted to show her life in photos in the reverse chronological order: she was happiest in Iran as a child, and I absolutely wanted the end of this story to be beautiful and joyful.

The project "Afsaneh" is not only the life of my aunt, recreated through photographs from documents. It is also evidence of how the process of their production changed over fifty years: once the photographer took pictures and the whole process was done manually, and today fully automated photo booths took his place. In the world, they use fingerprint scanning and other identification mechanisms, and they are obviously much more reliable than documents with ordinary photos that are so easy to forge. In this sense, Afsaneh ID cards are real historical artifacts. They are valuable in themselves as evidence of how short a century a photograph has lived as a document that once irrefutably confirmed the person’s identity.