The title, Ordinary Grief, is itself a provocation, drawn from Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief, a collection of autobiographical essays in which Parisa cites as a guiding emotional register. “He writes about living under occupation,” she explains, “the pain of exile, and of being silenced in your own land. He describes grief as continuous, absorbed into daily existence.” Rather than isolate dramatic moments, her photographs dwell in the cumulative effects of weariness and resignation. “Over the years, economic collapse, state repression, and political violence have worn down bodies and minds, souls and imaginations. I saw and felt grief in every encounter,” she writes. “In weary slumped shoulders, long stares into space, thoughtful pauses in conversation.” It is ambient and structural. But crucially, it is not passive. “Grief is the condition of everyday life,” she adds, “woven into every gesture and any attempt to move forward. These moments lay bare a quiet resignation, the fading of ambition, the surrender of hope for something more.”

Trained in photojournalism, Parisa often works within linear narrative structures depending on the story and context. Ordinary Grief evolved in response to the realities of working under surveillance and censorship in Iran. Those limitations pushed her to find new ways of photographing, and from that constraint, a more poetic and intuitive form of narrative began to take shape, one in which her photographs accumulate meaning like refrains in a song. “The sequence moved like a poem,” she notes, “flowing from one note to the next.” Photographs are pulled from the archive years later, re-sequenced, re-read, sometimes only revealing their layers with time. “Photographs don’t stay fixed,” she says. “Their meaning shifts over time, as the country changes, and as I change, too.”

This refusal to fix meaning is both aesthetic and ethical. Parisa is acutely aware of how Iran is flattened and misrepresented in global media. “Without careful sequencing,” she warns, “photographs of women in hijab, men praying, or protest crowds can be too easily read through the narrow lens the West often applies.” Rather than omit these realities, she situates them among others — children playing in the snow in Tehran, a family gathering in Lorestan, a Kurdish man caressing his horse in Ilam. These images counterbalance the tropes without disavowing the truth. In doing so, Parisa opens space for a practice grounded in mutual responsibility rather than extraction.

That responsibility is central to Parisa’s process, particularly when photographing communities in politically sensitive environments. Her work is embedded in long-term trust and collaborative decision-making. One example she recounts: “I photographed the secret engagement party of two friends. The woman’s parents were against their inter-faith marriage. In Iran, women who have not been married must obtain official consent from their father before marriage. The bride did not get this consent but proceeded with the engagement party anyway. There were five of us in attendance at a secret garden in Tehran.” Parisa was permitted to photograph the couple over the years, but several photographs have never been published. “We decide together what to conceal and what to reveal,” she explains. “My process is inherently collaborative.” Here, documentary photography is no longer about ‘taking’ an image; it becomes a shared act of holding space, of protecting stories too vulnerable for public scrutiny.

Ordinary Grief is shaped by Parisa’s own embodied knowledge of displacement. Born in Iran and raised in Canada, she describes her own experience of dislocation. “Looking back,” she reflects, “I was really searching for a way to move through the world on my own terms. That longing came from an oppressive childhood in Iran, and from the deep sense of not belonging I felt after immigrating.” Her formative experience as a 21-year-old volunteer in post-Katrina New Orleans marked the beginning of her photographic voice. “Photography offered something I hadn’t known how to name at the time: freedom, direction, and the ability to speak without someone else’s permission.” This ethos of using the camera as a tool for listening and being seen continues to define her work to this day.

What emerges from Ordinary Grief is a body of work that is simultaneously intimate and methodical, personal and political. Its power lies in a visual language of gestures, pauses, and glances. Parisa’s photographs do not demand interpretation; they demand presence. We are invited not to consume these images, but to sit with them, slowly. To acknowledge the quiet persistence of care in a country too often mischaracterized only by crisis. “Despite trauma and tragedy,” she says, “I didn’t want to portray Iran as unbearably and relentlessly dark, bleak. The suffering is real, but it’s not unique to Iran — and it doesn’t define everyone’s life. Visualizing joy and resistance felt equally — if not more — urgent. There are powerful stories of survival in the quiet details of daily life. Simply being alive on your own terms matters as much as the violence in the headlines.”

In exhibiting Ordinary Grief in North America and Europe, Parisa brings not only images but the contextual narratives that accompany them — stories like Leila’s, a woman who married at 19 to escape her overbearing father, only to find herself with a violent and addicted husband. “Despite conservative, familial pressure not to divorce, she chose to become a strong single woman,” Parisa explains. “I was able to share what I saw in Leila: remarkable tenacity and courage in the face of overwhelming odds and rigid social mores.” These personal histories give weight and specificity to the photographs, transforming them from anonymous documents into acts of witness.