About

Hooman Pourmehr was born in Tehran in 1989, into a house where things were always being built. His father, an engineer by trade and a builder by temperament, could not leave a material alone without shaping it, and he handed that restlessness to his son early. Hooman remembers being four years old, standing at a kitchen counter, building small structures out of bread dough because there was nothing else in reach and his father saw no reason to stop him.

The same instinct sent him, a few years later, into his father's darkroom, a closet-sized room that smelled of chemicals and felt like the inside of a secret. He watched blank paper hold nothing, then everything, as it moved through the baths: developer, stop, fix, each one pulling a picture up out of the paper as if it had been hiding there all along. Watching something hidden become visible, permanent, un-loseable: that process is the closest thing Hooman has to an origin story. Photography, to him, has never stopped feeling like that first darkroom: a way of making sure something survives.

He trained as a civil engineer, earning his bachelor's degree and spending years on construction sites and in structural drawings, learning what it actually takes to make something stand: the load, the joint, the material that has to be trusted before it can be tested. It was not a detour from art; it was the other half of it. After years of building for other people's plans, he returned to school for a master's degree in Art Philosophy, and began building on his own terms: casting bronze in a studio he set up himself, working the same instinct that once shaped bread dough into a material that would outlast him.

Hooman describes his work, in both photography and sculpture, as an extension of simply having lived: each experience, each place, each material, has to be built and then captured, or human memory will not carry it past a certain point. Bronze is his way of building it. Photography is his way of capturing it. He lives and works between Tehran and his studio, still making things stand up, still watching images surface out of nothing.