This work began with the distance between the way a woman's body is often imagined — soft, delicate, vulnerable — and the weight and hardness of a car scrapyard.
I made these photographs in Iran in 2018. The scenes were constructed rather than observed. I worked with two women, directing their gestures and movements among damaged cars, loose parts and exposed machinery. Even the men who appear in the background entered the frame under my direction. I was not trying to document women at work. I wanted to create an encounter between the female body and a space that seems built to resist it.
Across the sequence, physical action gradually becomes pressure. The body begins upright and purposeful, but is slowly confined by metal, lowered towards the ground and drawn into the machinery around it. By the final images, the boundary between body and object has become uncertain: skin, cloth, engine parts and car interiors occupy the same visual space.
Although two women appear in the photographs, the sequence does not follow a single character. Their bodies form a shared feminine presence moving through different states of effort, exposure and disappearance.
The title does not suggest that iron becomes gentle. It asks whether hardness can register the shape of a body without consuming it. The women neither surrender to the space nor conquer it. Their presence changes the meaning of the machinery, while the machinery, in turn, changes how their bodies are seen.
