Skeletons of Tehran
- Black-and-white silver gelatin prints, medium format film
- 2019–2021
- Tehran, Iran
Wide shot, dawn light on an unfinished tower's rebar frame
Every skyline is a construction site before it is a skyline. For two years, Hooman photographed Tehran's half-built towers at the hour just after sunrise, when the exposed rebar and scaffolding catch light the way bone catches an X-ray. Trained as a civil engineer before he was a photographer, he shoots these structures the way an engineer reads a drawing, looking for the load, the joint, the moment a building commits to standing up.
The series is a study of the in-between: not blueprint, not finished building, but the honest, unglamorous skeleton in between. It is the part every city has and no one is meant to see for long.