Photography — PICTURE POET

Street Photography

Chinese New Year Celebration. NYC

Street Vendor. Brooklyn

Photography and Performance

Performer and Costume Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Oolduz

The photographic frame creates a confined space in which I am exposed, observed, and captured. Yet this confinement also becomes a site of resistance. Within its boundaries, I search for a language of my own—a way to reclaim the image, confront my vulnerability, and challenge the conditions under which I am seen. My gestures become a means of pushing against the limits of representation, as though the desire to break the frame were inseparable from the act of being photographed.

Ultimately, my performance before the camera is a search for truth and freedom within the very space that seeks to contain me. I want to move beyond the image imposed upon me and approach something closer to my own core: an embodied, self-defined identity that refuses shame, resists confinement, and remains true to its own expression. The frame may capture my body, but it cannot fully contain who I am.

Performer and Costume Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Aaron Zinder

Concept, Art Direction, and Performer Sholeh Dalai, Video Still/ Camera 2 Aaron Zinder

Concept and Performer Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Sailor Noom

Concept, Performance, Art Direction, and Collage Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Aaron Zinder

Place of My Second Birth. Photo, Art Direction, and Concept Sholeh Dalai

Celebration, Imagination, and Camaraderie.

Referencing Forugh Farrokhzad’s Persian Poetry. Performer and Concept Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Sailor Noom

Referencing Forugh Farrokhzad’s Persian Poetry. Performer and Concept Sholeh Dalai, Photo by Sailor Noom

My photographs exist somewhere between documentation and abstraction, recognition and uncertainty. They hold onto the immediacy of a passing moment while opening a space for contemplation, where the everyday becomes poetic and the familiar reveals itself as something newly seen —- all in conversation with the female gaze.