In Ahmad Abad, a suburb of the Iranian city of Tabriz, a gaggle of children were playing on a gas pipe. Akbar Mehrinezhad often took photographs here, on the edge of the city, drawn to the subjects he found. When he saw these children some way off in the distance, he had to move quickly. “I ran to capture it. Even without seeing their faces, it’s storytelling,” he says of his choice to focus on their shadows, and one pair of dangling feet.
When he shared the photograph online, it “drew the attention of city officials” to the lack of safe spaces for play. “I try to display these inappropriate conditions in a beautiful way, to show the potential of the children and people in this area.”
Mehrinezhad grew up in Tabriz and did his BA at the city’s university. He is now taking a PhD at the University of Tehran. “I was lucky to have an intelligent and knowledgable mother who encouraged us to study, but most of the children on the outskirts of the city don’t continue in education. Even so, I see myself as a child in them. My friends and I played like this, too; this photo is like a snapshot of my own childhood,” he says.
He showed the photograph to the children afterwards, which made them smile. “I think it gave them a sense of identity.”
