“What is it you’re hoping for — taking so many pictures of a tree in the dark?”
The question came to me one evening while photographing an Acacia tree. Not long after, I was invited by mohit.art to write an essay on hope — a quiet and fragile theme. I carried it with me, unsure of its weight, and what it looks like here, in this new place.
I had traveled to Qeshm before, but this time I had to stay longer, so it was different. I gathered life’s essentials to stay for a season or two. In this unfamiliar situation, I didn’t want to rush into making things that I didn’t yet understand. So instead of chasing a subject, I decided to document the chase itself.
The search.
The indecision.
The making.
A way to stay with uncertainty and see what might surface.
No matter where I am, certain things stick with me — a conversation, an impression, a poem, a tone of light. If one lingers, I follow it. I engage with it slowly, attentively. I don’t always know why. But along the way, the subject begins to reveal itself. So I began documenting the process. I wanted to observe my own movement — how I keep looking, adjusting, failing, returning. What kind of hope compels me to try again and again to get closer to something I can’t quite name?
I’m exploring what allows hope to emerge through the process of making. A quiet, stubborn faith in form, in light, in process.
Everywhere out in the desert of Qeshm Island there are lots of hand-carved wells, etched into the land’s hard, stony surfaces. Not deep — more like shallow basins, wide at the base. They weren’t made to find water, but rather to hold it, briefly, when it comes. Rain arrives rarely, and the wells collect it. Sweet water.
They wait. That’s what they were made for.
Everywhere out in the desert of Qeshm Island there are lots of handmade water reservoirs. Some new, some old. With white domes, they rise from the earth like quiet observatories or buried shrines. Inside, they’re hollow. Waiting.
I asked, “Who takes care of them?”
“The people. Just whoever is around,” said the man.
There’s something communal in that — a kind of unspoken agreement to maintain what belongs to no one and everyone. And they trust this water. These shallow basins feel more honest than the pipes.
They’re built not for certainty, but for possibility. Not because the rain will come, but because it might. They have different names and stories, but all were built with the same intention. Each one feels like an act of patience, of care extended into the future.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this — about the gesture of making something in the moment, not because it has immediate use but because it might someday. That’s the kind of impulse I find myself following: a kind of carving out. Preparing for something I can’t see yet. Or might not see at all.
I often wonder what it is in the past that I search for when I try to understand a place. What do I expect to find there — some origin that will illuminate the present? Or maybe I’m drawn to what has held its shape; what still bears the imprint of time more than human touch.
I catch myself doing it online. Typing words into search bars, sometimes the name of a village, sometimes a tradition, looking for something to ground myself. And then I ask: Why here? Why look into this vast, shifting field we call the internet? Why trust its links and pixels to tell me something meaningful about a place so textured and vivid?
I think it’s the illusion of access, of immediacy. The feeling that something buried might emerge, by chance, if I just look long enough. But more than that — it’s the act itself. The way I move through it feels like a kind of play.
When I search, I don’t begin with certainty. I move sideways, diagonally. One page leads to another, one word pulls another out of hiding. And slowly I realize that what I’m doing is not unlike weaving — laying down a fragile thread through the unknown.
The archive reveals things to me, but it also reveals me to myself: how I follow desire, how I circle the same themes, how the structure of the web guides and redirects my route.
There’s a program behind it — shaped by algorithms, language, geopolitics — deciding what I see and what I don’t. And still, I play.
I take part in this game, letting the boundaries reveal themselves only through use.
The archive becomes both a maze and a map.
It reminds me of Ariadne’s thread. The heroine who hands over a lifeline before Theseus enters the labyrinth. I think of the thread not only as a tool for escape but as a mark of care, a quiet method of returning. And what if the labyrinth isn’t a trap, but the structure of our own searching? What if it’s the act of moving through — noticing what draws us, what repeats, what resists?
In “Hashish in Marseilles,” German philosopher Walter Benjamin writes about the joy of unrolling a ball of thread. He compared it to intoxication, to the rhythm of creation: “We go forward, but in so doing, we only discover the twists and turns of the cave … the pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread.”
That sentence stays with me. Because it’s about not just where we end up but also how we move. The body, the hand, the screen, the eye — all following something intuitive and strange.
This is how I make things, I think.
The thread is not always visible. Sometimes it’s a question, sometimes a gesture — a movement loaded with intention, even when its direction isn’t yet clear. I recall philosopher and writer Vilém Flusser’s thoughts on gestures: he saw them as meaningful movements of the body, expressions of inner thought.
I wonder if these digital gestures — clicking, saving, scrolling, pausing — could carry the same weight. Not just actions, but attempts. Ways of tracing an invisible shape I haven’t fully named. I treat these acts not as efficient steps toward a goal but as part of the experience itself — feeling my way forward, uncertain but alert. They are pauses in time, punctuated by instinct, emotion, fragments of memory. A gesture toward something not yet made.
Working in the field of art often comes with doubts, struggles, and limitations. Each time, I immerse myself in this bewilderment — not to solve it, but to offer something into the world that might stand on its own. When life itself becomes the source of inspiration, the scattered nature of ideas and the slow gathering of thoughts often become part of the struggle.
My approach is to follow the traces embedded in the images — fragments of lived experience that surface unconsciously in each photograph. Finding those fragments requires a steady kind of looking, a quiet scrutiny that unfolds inside the images. It’s there that doubts often surface, too. The uncertainty of life is mirrored in the process of making, and it continues in editing, in the unceasing act of returning and reconsidering.
I’ve come to understand hope as a form of bearing. The willingness to stay inside difficulty — to keep returning to a rhythm, a question, a practice. To follow a thread even when it tangles. Not in pursuit of clarity, but as a form of attention.
I see this same act of bearing in all the landscapes around me, especially in plants shaped by harsh conditions. The palm trees on Qeshm adapt themselves to survive heat, salt, and dryness. They don’t resist change; they respond to it — cleverly, subtly. From afar, they shimmer with delicacy, their fronds catching the light. But up close, their bodies resist easy touch: thick, thorny leaves; dense, armored trunks. There’s something deeply intelligent in how they continue.
Over the past two months, I’ve photographed the same palm garden fifty-one times, with different tools and techniques. I return, again and again, with the hope that one frame might carry all of it — its softness and strength, its persistence.
When the apparatus changes, it brings its own logic and constraints — yielding different outcomes. And the photographer is always working within the limits of the apparatus and its program.
I’ve included ten of those photographs here, as a trace of that process — of how tools and their limitations shape what we see, and how each technique reveals a different truth. It is likely that no single photograph can contain all the qualities of this tree. I’m looking for it, but I accept that I might never reach it.
I’ve been thinking about what hope lies in such repetition. Is it the hope that a body of work will begin to define itself? That, through returning to a place or an idea again and again, parameters might quietly emerge? Or is it simply a trust in process — that staying with something long enough might allow it to speak?
Hope, then, might live in this movement — this choice to stay with something unfinished. In not turning away, even when the outcome is uncertain. In trusting that coherence might slowly form, not through force, but through persistence.
And so I return to this thread — a line that gathers my thoughts on endurance: in bodies, in roots, in repeated gestures. It feels like a conversation between human effort and the instinctive adaptability of the natural world. The palm trees don’t harden against difficulty — they adjust, they shift, they respond with a grace that never announces itself. Maybe this is what I follow, again and again: the quiet determination of continuing. A practice of being with the world — not solving it, but staying long enough for something to grow.
What I’ve gathered here isn’t a linear path but a woven surface — textured with uncertainty, layered with hesitation, shaped by the act of making itself.
This essay does not seek answers — it follows a trace of hope through the darkness of the path. A hope embedded in the act of making art, and not in its outcome.
Spring 2025
Guran, Qeshm Island
Shahrzad Darafsheh, “Bear With Me: The Process of Creating Art – Hope and Ambiguity,” in mohit.art NOTES #16 (June/July/August 2025); published on www.mohit.art, May 31, 2025.
Header image: Shahrzad Darafsheh, Untitled, 2025. Digital photography. Courtesy of the artist.
