Poverty in Wealth

Artist Statement

Bandar Abbas is one of Iran's most important economic cities, connected to ports, oil, steel, aluminum, shipping, and large commercial industries. From a distance, the city suggests movement, wealth, and opportunity. But on its margins, many families live without stable access to basic needs such as welfare, clean water, electricity, health care, and education.

Poverty in Wealth follows children and families growing up inside this contradiction. The photos look at lives shaped by absence: absent services, absent protection, absent attention. At the same time, the project avoids reducing people to statistics. It stays close to daily gestures, faces, homes, and temporary shelters, showing how childhood continues even in insecure conditions. The series asks what wealth means when it exists beside people who are still left without the foundations of a safe life.