When the Wrapping Is Beautiful — What Comes Out of It?

Reza Daryakenari on Staged Photography, Painting Without a Canvas, and Building a World Before You Shoot It — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode 89

You can admire something and still ask: so what? Reza Daryakenari describes reaching exactly that moment — receiving compliments, looking at his own work, thinking it was beautiful, and then the question surfacing that changed the direction of everything: is this art? Can this hang on a gallery wall? When someone stands in front of it, does something happen in them that persists after they walk away?

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Daryakenari traces a fifteen-year arc from documentary photography through portraiture to what he now calls staged photography — a practice in which every element in the frame, from the location to the costume to the prop in the corner of a table, is written in advance, like words composing a sentence. Along the way, he talks about Baroque painting, Qajar portraits, post-metal album covers, Game of Thrones set design, and what it means to make an image that hasn’t expired yet.

From Snapshots to Something That Has Something to Say

Daryakenari began, like many photographers, in documentary work — drawn to the form’s directness, its claim to simply show the world as it is. Looking back now, he describes that early period with clear-eyed retrospection: the images had the packaging and appearance of documentary photography, but no story, no narrative, no reference to any social reality. A village girl beside her sheep. An old woman. A butcher in a provincial town with a slightly aged shop front. They looked correct. They said nothing.

The problem, he understood later, wasn’t the category. It was that his worldview at the time was narrow — his understanding of art, of photography, of what surrounded him hadn’t yet developed enough to give him something worth photographing. The form couldn’t compensate for the absence of content.

“A photographer who is also an artist,” he says, “isn’t just aware of composition and light. That’s all technical. The question is what concept, what meaning they’re creating — the layer beneath the image, beyond the visual packaging. When you unwrap it: what comes out?”

The Long Road to Artist

The shift happened gradually, accelerated by internet access that opened a visual library he hadn’t had before. He began seeing work in categories he’d barely encountered — portrait photography of a completely different kind than he’d imagined. He started experimenting with light and shadow play, then double exposure, adding elements to images rather than simply capturing them. Portrait became set-design. Set design became full narrative.

But technical accumulation alone brought him to another wall: he could produce work people called beautiful. He could feel that it was beautiful. And then — he describes this as a pivotal question — he started wondering whether this could be accepted as art. Whether it could enter a gallery. Whether standing in front of it, a viewer would begin to think, to form their own interpretation, to start a genuine dialogue between themselves and the work rather than simply admire a pretty surface and move on.

The answer that emerged was that the visual layer — no matter how refined — can only carry meaning if something is actually embedded within it. So he began deliberately expanding his context: studying art history, literature, philosophy, politics. Not as background research for specific projects but as a way of widening the lens through which he saw the world.

The Trigger That Stays Hidden

One of the most revealing exchanges in the episode is about where Daryakenari’s work actually comes from — and how it reaches the audience. He describes his process as socially observant but deliberately not reactive: he notices something in the culture, a wound or an absence or a pattern that hasn’t been looked at from a particular angle, and builds a narrative around it. But he refuses to make the source explicit, to let it read as commentary or slogan.

He gives an example: a series about the psychological fractures and inner damage of women who have experienced violence or insecurity — a broad, urgent social subject. But rather than approaching it as a social statement, he selects one or two individuals, extracts their emotional interior, and constructs a visual space around that interior. Someone may engage with the work at that deeper level. Someone else may connect with it entirely through their own personal life, a private crisis that has nothing to do with the series’ literal subject. The work allows both.

“I didn’t want the reaction to feel like a wave — just because something happened and everyone is reacting to it. I looked at the same event from a different angle, one that hadn’t been tried or had been tried less.”

This is also why he avoids what he calls sloganeering: direct, readable, clear-message art that produces an immediate recognition and then closes. He wants work that doesn’t expire — that isn’t tied to a specific event in a specific country in a specific year and therefore meaningless outside that context. He reaches this by grounding narratives in human emotion rather than geography, and by treating universality not as abstraction but as a specific bet: that anyone, anywhere, has experienced something adjacent to what the image contains.

Locations That Cannot Be Faked

Daryakenari’s visual world is built around abandoned and semi-derelict architecture — places with peeling walls, rusted frames, traces of having been left behind. He is asked the obvious question: why not simply use a studio? Why not build the set you need under controlled conditions?

His answer is partly practical — reproducing the patina of a genuinely aged wall at studio scale, with the textures he needs, would require a budget in the range of historical film productions, not photography — but also principled. He can tell the difference between a wall that time has aged and a wall that a scenic artist has aged. He knows immediately which is which. And that difference matters to him in a way he traces directly back to documentary photography: something in him reads a constructed surface as false, and he doesn’t want that falseness in the image.

So instead of building the set, he travels constantly, searching — going through alleys in cities and villages, finding old houses with unusual architecture, asking who owns them and whether he can enter. Out of perhaps twenty such visits in different cities across different trips, one will have conditions that allow a shoot to happen. He keeps a running list of narratives, waiting. A location arrives. An idea from the list moves toward it. Or an idea already exists and a location comes that fits it. He has worked both directions.

Writing a Scene Before Shooting It

The most detailed section of the conversation is Daryakenari’s account of how a shoot actually comes together. By the time he enters a location, roughly eighty percent of what will appear in the frame exists in his mind: he knows where the light will come from, where the figure will stand, what the color palette will be, what the accessories will add to the narrative. He has sometimes filled an entire car with props — objects that will be staged, arranged, and adjusted before a single frame is taken.

The remaining twenty to thirty percent happens on set, through improvisation. He describes moments where something he planned in detail failed to produce the image he’d imagined, and something unexpected — a changed pose, a different piece of clothing, a small shift in arrangement — suddenly became more right than what he’d prepared. He talks about this not as unpredictability to be managed but as a quality of working in a creative space rather than an engineering one: sometimes the best outcome isn’t where you thought the path was leading.

Everything in the frame is part of this intentionality: the pose, the makeup, the gaze of the figure, the fabric falling across a shoulder, the object resting in a corner. Nothing is accidental. But the final result regularly surprises even him.

Painting on a Canvas He Doesn’t Own

The aesthetic that has crystallized in Daryakenari’s work over years of this practice is deliberate and precisely positioned: the quality of light of Baroque and Renaissance painting, the color depth that a canvas provides but a print rarely matches, combined with a visual texture rooted in Iranian Qajar painting — the place where European chiaroscuro and Iranian miniature tradition converged.

He describes this as a personal obsession he has carried since before he was a photographer: following galleries, reading art history, drawn above all to the extraordinary richness of color in European painting from Enlightenment through Modernism. What frustrated him was that photography almost never achieved that density of color and light — it was always thinner. So printing on canvas became one response: it removes the backlit quality of a screen, allows reflected light to interact with the surface differently, and brings the image physically closer to the material experience of painting.

“The color a canvas gives — I was always in love with that. And I almost never saw it in photography. There’s a gap there, and I decided to try to fill it.”

He also describes an ambitious reworking he undertook: shooting a reinterpretation of a Kamal al-Mulk painting — a specific, historically documented work — hunting for a location whose architecture, light source, and perspective matched the original closely enough to make a genuine comparison possible. It took approximately a month and a half just to find the right room. The exercise produced two frames: one matching Kamal al-Mulk’s perspective, one taken from his own chosen angle. The point was not merely recreation but a kind of visual conversation across time: here is how this scene looked to a nineteenth-century Iranian painter; here is how it looks to a photographer standing in the same room a century and a half later.

The Iranian Element — As Language, Not Decoration

Hossein presses Daryakenari on something visible throughout his work: the deliberate use of Iranian visual elements — Qajar architecture, tribal textiles, traditional garments, turquoise tones — and whether this is a strategy for attracting international viewers through exotic material.

Daryakenari pushes back directly: no. The Iranian elements are not bait. They are there because the work is Iranian, and he wants the work to carry a debt to its own cultural inheritance. He thinks about it in terms of a relay: he received something from the artists before him, he makes changes and additions, and eventually he passes it on. He wants what he passes on to be identifiably connected to where it came from.

At the same time, he is careful not to let the work read as traditional or folkloric — that, he says, would cost him the contemporary viewer. The Iranian elements are present but not dominant; European and Russian objects appear in the same frames alongside Iranian ones. He uses them carefully, so that the result feels like something happening today rather than something preserved in amber. And practically, he notes that the most relevant immediate market for his work isn’t Western collectors but those in the cultural sphere of his own region: Iranian, Turkish, and Gulf Arab collectors who share enough cultural reference to understand the narratives without translation — and who, in some cases, may find those narratives even more directly recognizable than he does.

Pink Floyd, Post-Metal, and What Music Taught Him About a Static Frame

Across the conversation, Daryakenari mentions two reference worlds that have shaped his visual language just as decisively as painting: cinema and music — specifically the album artwork tradition in progressive and metal music.

He describes Storm Thorgerson’s work for Pink Floyd: shoots involving hundreds of fully staged frames, photographed at scale, from which a single image would be selected for an album cover. That ambition — the idea that an image could carry the same emotional density as the music it accompanied — became a formative reference. He also mentions the visual world of death and doom metal bands (Draconian, Anathema, Moonspell) as another register he was drawn to: dark, heavily atmospheric, using nature not as postcard scenery but as something threatening or sublime.

From cinema, the learning was more structural. He describes pausing scenes in films — Game of Thrones, in particular — and analyzing individual frames: what material was used for the curtain, how the light was falling on the stone wall, what the floor surface was and how it interacted with the light sources. He was teaching himself to read a location the way a cinematographer would: not as a found space but as a series of decisions about color, texture, material, and depth.

“Some of my photographs — the horizontal ones — I try to make the frame cinematic. So that someone who doesn’t know the context might say: which film was this from? And then realize it isn’t a film frame at all.”

The Gas Mask Series — And What Happens When You Make Something Unmistakably Yours

One of the most vivid passages in the episode is Daryakenari’s account of a series he had been thinking about for years: figures wearing chemical gas masks. The idea had existed in sketch form, but he had set it aside, feeling he hadn’t yet arrived at the maturity to execute it well — and knowing that the internet was full of photographs using gas masks as props, most of them generic.

What eventually unlocked it was finding a specific angle: feminizing the mask entirely — decorating it with pearl embroidery until it read as a luxury accessory, a piece of couture worn to a wedding, rather than industrial protective equipment. Then removing it from the world of fashion and moving it toward apocalyptic space: torn, elaborate garments that suggest post-apocalyptic survival dressed in the remnants of formal elegance. The location became a Qajar-era building, so the apocalypse happening in the frame is specifically an Iranian one — the architecture, the wrought iron window frames, the plasterwork visible behind the scene, all of it anchoring the darkness in a particular place and culture.

The result sits deliberately on a border: on one side it reads as fashion photography, on the other as fine art. He describes navigating that edge carefully — using it rather than choosing one side, because the ambiguity itself creates tension that neither category alone could produce.

On Deva, and the Shahnameh Revisited

The episode reaches one of its most visually striking descriptions in the discussion of a collection Daryakenari calls Deva — built around Iranian mythological figures, specifically demons and supernatural beings from Persian literary tradition. The visual logic of the series is hybrid: the styling and figures belong to fashion photography, but the atmosphere of the set and the choice of character derive directly from Iranian epic literature. The costumes are modern and fashion-forward with Iranian touches, but they are worn by characters from the Shahnameh — demon masks (div) as characters, placed in a visual environment that aims for the illuminated manuscript quality of Persian miniature painting, achieved through lighting and color grading rather than illustration.

This is, in miniature, a model of Daryakenari’s entire practice: taking Iranian cultural material seriously enough to investigate it rigorously, then presenting it in a form that neither translates it into something European nor seals it in historical amber — but places it in a contemporary visual conversation that could be recognized anywhere, even by viewers who don’t know its source material.

A Cozy Corner That Looks Like a Café

Asked where his own cozy corner is, Daryakenari answers without hesitation: his home. He has deliberately shaped it to feel like a space he would want to be in — not a purely functional apartment but something closer to a café in atmosphere, layered with objects, calibrated to be a place where friends also want to stay. He listens to music there, watches films, reads lyrics. Ideas arrive not as single sparks but as a continuous process of slow cooking: something plays, something builds, something in the accumulated texture of the space begins to take form. The cozy corner is where the raw material becomes something he can take to a location.

A Dedication

Daryakenari dedicates the conversation to Anita Izad Panah — his stylist, the person who writes the captions, statements, and titles for his collections, and who coined the Persian word “Chamara” (face-dresser) as an alternative to the borrowed term “makeup artist.” He credits her presence with elevating his work to a level it couldn’t have reached alone, and says he is glad to have her alongside him.