From November 5, 2026 to January 9, 2027, Galerie Maubert presents Que vos pas soient légers car vous marchez sur mes rêves, the third solo exhibition by Iranian photographer Payram at the gallery in Paris, as part of the bicentenary of photography. Bringing together works created using various analogue photographic techniques (Polaroids, baryta prints, solarized prints, collages…), the exhibition explores notions of exile, refuge, and memory. Forced to leave Iran in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, Payram has developed, since the mid-1980s, a body of work in which photography becomes a means of questioning absence, transmission, and the intimate bonds that are formed or transformed through the experience of exile.

Fugue, Refuge, Transfuge (1)

Much ink has been spilled since Edward Said’s reflections on exile. He taught us that the loss of one’s place of origin, of the bonds that constitute our roots, can represent both a weakness and a sense of lack, and a new critical capacity in relation to borders, nationalist thinking and, ultimately, states. In other words, the marginal position often imposed upon the exile enables them to see what those who occupy the centre no longer see. While Edward Said was sharply critical of the tendency to portray the exile as a romantic and cosmopolitan figure, he nevertheless acknowledged their capacity to develop non-normative narratives and hybrid visions.

Much in Payram’s work stems from his “Franco-Iranian” identity: two sides that, for the artist, are perhaps better understood as two floating canvases drifting over one another according to the wind, rather than as the two ends of an intercultural bridge, however necessary such a bridge may be (2). Certainly, Payram’s exile and uprooting—he has not returned to Iran since 1983, against his will—remain essential keys to understanding his work. A meticulous and patient body of work that takes its time, gradually revealing itself, without making a great noise and without any excessive desire for “visibility” or recognition.

This is even more true in the context of the present exhibition at Galerie Maubert, which brings together foundational works from the 1990s as well as previously unseen bodies of work from the 2000s. Payram is known for never rushing and for being something of a hermit photographer. Far from creating in order to exhibit, he keeps his photographic proofs carefully archived in boxes, sometimes for decades, before finally bringing them to light. This period of dormancy allows him to distil his work anachronistically, through delays and surprises, rather than chronologically, as in a catalogue raisonné. An approach that resonates particularly with the temporalities of latency and postponement so familiar to the exile, for whom the experience of time unfolds more through spirals and survivals than in straight lines.

Beyond exile in the strict sense, the various series of images presented here seem to evoke an atmosphere of fugue, refuge and transfuge; three poetic-philosophical motifs that are at once convergent and divergent.

The fugue of identity, unstable and elusive, sometimes seeming to escape, sometimes allowing itself to be captured; the fugue of all those faces disappearing into shadow or into a zone of blur, behind a hand, a flash of light, or a textural effect produced by scraping or chromatic washing. So many fleeting states of mind unfolding at will in the series Fragile, as in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (3). In the artist’s self-portrait, his face drifts away in a flurry of agitated fingers, through superimposition and transparency. In his self-portrait with his parents, bodies decompose and recompose themselves; one can no longer tell who is who, who loses their head and who finds it again. Fugue once more, in the sequence of images Chanson orientale, where the artist’s hand reaches for a pomegranate that slips away from it, leaving behind only an intangible signal of light. In Payram’s work, photographic fugue unfolds through the paradox of the tactile and the intangible. His images evoke the temptation to touch without ever yielding to it, like the tide that advances and recedes, endlessly; like the bird that alights on the windowsill and always flies away before entering the house.

Refuge, meanwhile, is everywhere, yet always within the ineffable. Such is the case with the individual or grouped bodies in the series Fragile, crouching or sitting on the ground, languid or uneasy, looking at one another or turning their backs, suspended in a troubling ambivalence: are they together or divided, sheltered or confined? Refuge takes the form of recurring motifs: here, a house drawn by a line of luminous effluence; there, a dwelling glimpsed behind a veil in the distance (Oslo, Norway); elsewhere, a shelter held together by nothing more than a few bricks and a piece of curtain (Petra, Jordan); a simple hanging cloth (Laval, France), standing as the minimal unit of what constitutes shelter or refuge.

In other views of rooms and spaces that are at once intimate and anonymous, the recurring motif of the empty bed and unpeopled sheets brings together fugue (someone has left) and refuge (someone is expected).

What eloquence, once again, in the theme of refuge, in the series Printemps, which depicts people literally taking refuge in the artist’s home. He photographed them asleep, from an aerial perspective, from his Parisian mezzanine. A series dating from the 1990s that nevertheless enters our present as if in opposition to the implacable reality that we live in a world of refugees without refuge. As the number of forcibly displaced people reaches historic highs, the very notion of asylum and protection is eroding across the planet; detention centres with inhumane conditions and deportations are becoming normalized, while makeshift tents line the boulevards of major cities, met with indifference. Within the microcosm of the artist’s live-work studio—a hybrid space between a shelter and a camera obscura—these bodies finally find rest. Under Payram’s indiscreet yet complicit gaze, they assume vulnerable positions that translate their inner drift (fugue), their unspeakable dreams. By enhancing them with the drawing and colour that Payram applies to the surface of the Polaroid—in the manner of a miniature painter—perspective and depth dissolve, giving way to a halo or a photo-pictorial cocoon that seems to protect these figures a second time, through mise en abyme.

One might also ask: is a photo-painter both photographer and painter, or is he neither? The merit of this exhibition is to reveal the extent to which photography has always constituted, for Payram, a field of phenomenological, human and chemical experimentation before becoming an autonomous and objective medium. Beyond its recording function, he approaches it as a speculative canvas filtering light and colour. One might even say that his artistic vocation is founded upon a fundamental infidelity to photographic doxa, to the idea of the purity of the medium, to the cult of documentary aesthetics. But can Payram nevertheless be presented as a painter? It is difficult not to pursue this digression given his relationship to matter, light, the veil and drapery, but also to the frame, which unfolds through several symbolic figures (the frame of the painting, the window, the mirror, the miniature). Yet Payram considers himself no more a painter than a photographer, and no more a photographer than a poet (William Butler Yeats, Federico García Lorca and the Persian poet Molana accompany him and occasionally coexist, in fragments, with his images). The Polaroid, by virtue of its unpredictability and malleability, represents for him a technique that resists photography’s inherent reproducibility. It allows him to pursue a new aura, the search for a unique experience. That of a haiku-image, lapidary and absolute, embracing accidents and imperfections, an organic grain, a shifting materiality. Indeed, one of the particularities of Polaroid film is that it allows the artist to intervene directly on the still-wet emulsion, whether with his fingers, a stylus or the tip of a key, as Payram regularly does.

Contrary to what one might think, there are not many photographic artists who, like Payram, have taken the practice of Polaroid to heart in order to make it an art form in its own right. At most, one might think of occasional, short-lived experiments: Andy Warhol’s Polaroids, which fall far short of exploiting its visual and poetic potential beyond their social and media-oriented dimensions; or the Polaroids made by André Kertész at the end of his life, allowing him to reconnect with his everyday surroundings for one final dance with photography. Among those who have truly explored the possibilities of Polaroid, one might cite Lucas Samaras, whose Photo-Transformations of the 1970s come somewhat close to Payram’s work. He turns the Polaroid into a material to be sculpted and used to deform bodies, but pushes it towards an extreme, expressionistic and self-centred form, sculpting the image of his own body; whereas Payram turns primarily towards the other, intent on preserving the singular presence of the subject represented despite its distortions. Physical and chemical alterations do not preclude otherness, or the recognition of the other in their full capacity to present themselves before the photographic lens—and, potentially, to escape it. One might even consider that Payram elevates the Polaroid into an art of intersubjectivity, in which the subject—with their doubts, their traumas...—fully plays their role and part in the making of the image, in interaction with the photographer. The primary quality of the Polaroid, its ability to reveal itself a few minutes after exposure, without a development process, while nevertheless remaining a real physical “proof”—without the dematerialization of the digital image and without the same distance in the relationship to the other—plays a fundamental role in this intersubjective process.

A final elective affinity we might evoke concerns cinema. Cinema that constructs phenomenological connections between the still image and the moving image, between action and waiting, but that also explores the subject’s capacity to exist within and beyond the image. In very different ways, this can be felt in Abbas Kiarostami and Andrei Tarkovsky, two metaphysicians of the image whose distant echoes can be sensed in Payram’s work. With Tarkovsky, one thinks of the frequent representation of bodies that are more or less asleep, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, acquiring the power to activate supernatural states and alternative spaces and times. Indeed, in all three artists, bodies seem to develop the paradoxical capacity to become icon or trace. Payram’s Portraits de femmes en blanc (1994) capture the faces of pregnant women in extremely tight framing, to the point of making their bodies disappear, leaving only an absolute and inescapable gaze, a mirror into which one plunges blindly. Materialized through the shimmering and fixation of their pupils, this transitional state of a body carrying life within it, between becoming-icon and becoming-trace, brings to mind Kiarostami’s film Shirin (2008). The film consists entirely of close-ups of women’s faces, seated in a cinema, watching a film we never see, but which is imagined as reflected in their pupils and micro-expressions.

In Payram as in Kiarostami, the subject’s taking possession of the image, against the one who is supposedly responsible for producing it, goes radically beyond a simple shot/reverse-shot relationship. It becomes the site of an existential passage—and, above all, of movement back and forth—between a world in which the body becomes image (from the tradition of religious icons to the history of the modern portrait) and a world in which the image becomes body: whether one thinks of the utopia of teleportation embodied in the holographic image, or simply of a poem’s ability to transport us elsewhere, through the trembling of an unfixed and imperfect image, poised to burst.

Indeed, in Payram’s work, the body or the subject, far from constantly retreating behind more or less ghostly or organic visual effects, adopts subjective modes of entering the image; ways of inhabiting it, but also of passing through it in order to move from one state to another; like a transfuge, or, one might say, a transi, whether between life and death, shadow and light, fugue and refuge. 

September 2026

Morad Montazami, Director, Zamân Books & Curator

1 The title of this text is inspired by the writings and thought of the philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona.

2 The Iranian diaspora in France has been so significant, from the 1950s to the present day, that one could write a history of Franco-Iranian art.

3 Title of the eponymous film by Jean-Luc Godard