About

Sahar Vatanz is an Iranian-British artist and photographer based in London. With more than eighteen years of experience across art and photography, her practice is concerned with what lies beneath appearances: the unstable space between what is seen, what is felt, and what can never be fully explained.

Her work is rooted in long exposure, intentional camera movement, reflections and in-camera multiple exposure. The transformation of the image happens entirely through the act of photographing itself. She does not rely on heavy digital manipulation to construct the final image; instead, light, time, movement and chance become the materials through which the photograph is formed.

Painting has always been central to the way Sahar thinks about image-making. She has long been drawn to the freedom painters have to distort, layer, fragment and move beyond literal representation. Although her chosen medium became photography rather than paint, that attraction never disappeared. Over time, it developed into a central question within her practice: how far can a photograph move away from description before it begins to behave like a painting?

This question led her towards a photographic language in which movement becomes brushstroke, duration becomes pigment, and the camera becomes a place where reality can loosen its fixed form. Her images often hover between figuration and abstraction. Faces dissolve, bodies fragment, spaces overlap and familiar forms become uncertain. Rather than offering an immediate reading, the work asks the viewer to remain inside that uncertainty.

For Sahar, this visual language is inseparable from lived experience. Migration, chronic illness and disability have profoundly shaped her understanding of the body, time and perception. Living with a body that can become unpredictable has changed the way she experiences movement, presence and control. Pain, fatigue, trauma and emotional states are often invisible from the outside, yet capable of completely altering the internal experience of a moment.

Photography became a way of giving form to what could not easily be spoken. When physical movement is limited, the camera can move. When language fails, colour, distortion, rhythm and duration can begin to speak differently. Through this process, Sahar does not seek to illustrate pain or translate it literally. She is interested in the more difficult territory around it: grief, isolation, vulnerability, memory, longing, disorientation, resilience, and the emotional states people learn to conceal in order to continue functioning within the world.

Her practice repeatedly returns to the tension between visibility and invisibility. She is interested in how easily a person can be misread by what appears on the surface, and in what happens when photography stops trying to describe the world accurately and instead begins to reveal how that world feels from within.

At the centre of Sahar’s work is an ongoing attempt to bring photography closer to painting—not by imitating it, but by allowing photography to become less certain, less literal, and more emotionally unstable. Her images occupy a space between control and surrender, presence and disappearance, movement and stillness, asking not simply what can be seen, but what may be hidden inside the act of seeing.

Creative Growth, in collaboration with Imperial Health Charity, London, UK
Co-facilitator
Co-facilitating a creative programme working with disabled participants and people living with long term health conditions, using art and creative practice as a space for expression, connection, and shared experience.