At the Caspian Lake, Khashayar Javanmardi captures a moment where water and humanity confront each other in silence. The silhouette of a fisherman with his nets is dwarfed by the dark horizon. 

This lake, once a source of abundance, has become a fading memory of what is vanishing. In Persian poetry, water is celebrated as purity and life, but equally as a warning: when a river dies, the civilisation around it dies as well. 

The 14^th-century Persian poet Hafez, for example, wrote of the banks of Roknabad—a historic spring near Shiraz, Iran, long cherished for its healing waters—as a place where beauty and transience merge, and calmness conceals a hidden struggle. 

Javanmardi’s image reminds us that saving a lake is not a local gesture but an attempt to save humanity as a whole. In his work, the path of love, rāh-e ‘eshq, might be read as a path of preservation: a responsibility towards that which transcends us. 

KHASHAYAR JAVANMARDI received a degree in Art and Architecture from the University of Guilan, Iran, and graduated in Photojournalism from the Danish Media and Journalism School (DMJX) in 2020. He also studied photojournalism at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany. At age 19 he started working for Jam Photo Agency in Iran. Javanmardi received the Iranian Emerging Talented Photographers of the Year Award three years in a row. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He also worked for Reuters and various Iranian publications. Khashayar Javanmardi is the founder of Mamaat Art Collective and the official photographer for Plateforme 10: the new art district in Lausanne, Switzerland.   

AYA MUSA is a curator at Foam. Prior to this, he was a curator and head programmer at the Nederlands Fotomuseum. In his work, Aya combines social developments with new exhibition forms, where photography is not subordinate to the context from which it arises, but at the same time never loses sight of this context. In this way, he gives photography a stage that goes beyond existing clichés. Since 2001, he has combined his work in the Netherlands with empirical ethnographic research into the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Currently, Aya is studying the photographic representation of victims of sectarian violence in the region.