AFSHAR, Hoda

About the Iranian photographer, Hoda AFSHAR (b. 1983)

Hoda AFSHAR is a documentary photographer who is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian Government. She says that her work explores how photographs may be 'used or misused by power systems create certain hierarchies between people'; and that '[documentary photography] is a visual language that has been formed and established through the lens of colonisation'. Hoda AFSHAR earned a Bachelor degree in Fine Art (Photography) at the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran, and began her career as a photographer in 2005. She moved to Australia in 2007, and completed her PhD in Creative Arts at Curtin University in 2019, with the subject of her thesis being 'images of Islamic female identity'. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is held in many permanent collections across Australia. Hoda AFSHAR is based in Melbourne.

Photo books by Hoda AFSHAR

'Speak the Wind' (2021)