Theo Santana's statement
During the Chinese new year, I decided to buy a ticket and go to Iran with my wife.
Why Iran? Because I wanted to visit and try to understand the country. So we checked that neither of us need a visa to Iran and found we could get one on arrival.
But how could we explore more of Iran?
We decided to rent a car and drive around as far as we could to explore and see this side of the world.
We rented a car for a cheap price and started to travel all the way south to a small city called Shiraz.
We planned to travel for two days, but we were in a wonderful country with a lot of people, so we decided to take it slow and stop city by city. This way I could take photos and talk with people on the way.
Before I went to Iran I had the idea that was a country that I should fear, since it was a dangerous country and I would die if I went there.
But when I arrived and saw the people, the food and the landscape, I was choked with all the good things that I met over there.
For this trip, I didn’t bring any digital cameras, only film ones that I decided to create a small project with.
Maybe one day I’ll go back there and try to publish something with those photos, so most of the pictures are related to our trip all the way to Shiraz and back to the capital the city of Tehran.
We drove a total of 2300km from north to south and back.
It was a crazy trip with good opportunities for photos and to get to know the people.
We knew the Iranian culture is so huge but we couldn’t imagine how huge, old and traditional it was.
A large part of human history is over there as before 1925 Iran was Persia, one of the biggest empires in world history. For some reason, it has collapsed in more recent years.
There were good people and good opportunities to take photographs in Iran, and these are some of the highlights from our trip.
For most of the photos I used the Nikon F80 with Kodak Gold 200 and Fuji C200, and with two different lenses; the Nikon 28mm F2.8 and the Nikon 85mm F1.8.