Iranian visual journalist Parisa Azadi has found a novel way to process state violence: setting her own photographs on fire. Not to erase them, but to convey what she calls ‘rage, grief and refusal.’ Because sometimes a good bonfire says what 1,000 words cannot.

In September 2022, as revolution spread across Iran, Azadi watched from Dubai via the unstable glow of phone screens. Raw videos surfaced daily before disappearing into internet blackouts: women burning their hijabs, young men wounded by metal pellets, teenagers dragged into unmarked vans. Unable to return safely to Iran, where she had spent six years documenting life under repression, she felt helpless.

Her solution: use open-source protest footage, isolate frames from videos circulating on social media, and photograph them directly from her computer with a Fujifilm instax camera, which produces prints immediately. She wanted to interrupt the relentless flow of digital images - turning ephemeral pixels into solid physical objects. Because nothing says ‘I’m paying attention’ like a grainy print of a teenager defying theocracy.

The process grew from her earlier work in Iran, where she carried an instax camera and gave portraits to strangers as yadegari - ‘something to remember me by.’ During the uprising, that same ethic took on new urgency, transforming the medium into a response to rebellion and censorship.

This particular image comes from a protest video in Tehran: crowds circle a fire burning in the street, holding hands and chanting, ‘You’re the pervert. You’re the whore. I’m a free woman’ - transforming misogynistic insults into defiance against the state. Azadi photographed the silhouette of a young woman, perhaps an adolescent, with a high ponytail moving against smoke and fluorescent light. Its grainy, pixelated surface carries the urgency of testimony over perfection, embracing what German artist Hito Steyerl calls the ‘poor image’ as a politically potent form of testimony.

In January 2026, after state massacres and executions, Azadi began burning the instax prints as an act of mourning. Fire scarred their surfaces, echoing the violence they depict. This was not erasure, but a way to push against the stillness of the image, allowing it to convey rage, grief and refusal. Because sometimes the only way to capture a revolution is to let it burn.