2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
Looking for a chapter event?
Past SPE Annual Conferences
exhibitions
South Central Chapter Conference Schedule
print this pageTāsiyān: What Remains Across Distance
Student Presentation
Friday, October 23 - 5:00PM to 5:10PM
WCAD 101
Tāsiyān is a Gilaki word from northern Iran. It describes a feeling that is difficult to translate into English: a deep longing for someone, somewhere, or something that is far away but still lives with you. It is not only homesickness. It is a presence of absence, a way of carrying what is no longer physically reachable, but never emotionally gone.
This presentation is about the journey that brought me to this world. Before moving to the United States, I worked as a documentary photographer in northern Iran, photographing everyday life and the people around me. My camera was a way of paying attention to the lives, stories, and struggles that often went unseen. After migration, my relationship with photography began to change. Distance entered my work in a way that was no longer theoretical but deeply physical and emotional.
Being separated from my family, living between languages and cultures, and facing the uncertainty of not knowing when, or if, I would be able to return home reshaped how I understood images. Internet disruptions and political conditions sometimes made it impossible to maintain a stable connection with the people I love. In those moments, photography became something different: not a record of what I could see, but a way of holding what I could not reach.
The family archive also began to shift in meaning. Old photographs, saved messages, and fragmented memories became active materials in my practice rather than static documents of the past. They started to behave like living things, appearing, disappearing, and resurfacing in unexpected ways.
Through projects such as The Birth of Solitude, Anchors, Memory's Edge, and Tāsiyān, I work with film and digital photography, projection, double exposure, long exposure, and layered image-making. These techniques allow me to build images that feel unstable and incomplete, where time overlaps, bodies dissolve into space, and visibility is always partial. I am not trying to reconstruct a lost reality, but to reflect the way memory itself behaves under pressure: fragmented, emotional, and constantly shifting.
Tāsiyān also connects deeply to my place of origin, Gilan, in northern Iran. It carries the emotional texture of that landscape, the rain, the distance from everything beyond it, and the way longing becomes part of everyday life. In this sense, the word is both personal and collective.
I share the development of my work from documentary photography in Iran to my current practice shaped by migration and displacement. I will reflect on how my visual language has shifted across these experiences, and how photography has become a way of continuing connection when physical proximity is no longer possible.
Although this work begins from my own life, it is not only about me. It speaks to a wider condition shared by many people living in migration, exile, or separation. Photography does not resolve distance or repair loss. But it creates a space where something remains, where memory, love, and presence continue to exist, even if only in fragments of light.
speaker
Maryam (Nilu) Ghasempour Siahgaldeh
About
- Board Reports, Letters, and Minutes
- History
- Staff
- Board Members
- Board Committees
- Board Elections
- SPE Code of Conduct
- Caucuses
Join
Members
Annual Conference
- About the Conference
- Overview
- Speakers
- Schedule
- Registration
- Volunteer
- Sponsors
- Exhibit
- Anti-Harassment Policy
- Hotel & Travel
- Location + Travel
- Hotel
- Schedule of Events
- Schedule
News & Events
Chapters
Exposure Journal
About this piece
Comments about this piece
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.