ARTIST STATEMENT
In Lingering Shadows, I explore how women are often expected to give endlessly—offering warmth, strength, and emotional labor—while their own identities fade into silence. In one image, a woman becomes obscured by a lampshade, an object meant to illuminate. Instead of empowering her, it masks her presence, symbolizing how domesticity, motherhood, and cultural expectations can confine rather than celebrate us. The light she provides is for others; her own self risks disappearing in its glow.
This series confronts the deeply embedded misogynistic narratives that tell women to be quiet, accommodating, and invisible. These photographs are not simply about absence—they reveal the psychological weight of being needed yet unseen. Each figure exists in a liminal space where illumination meets erasure, where softness is demanded but voice is denied. Yet within these shadows lives resistance. The women in my images do not surrender entirely; their bodies, gestures, and presence whisper defiance.
By reclaiming the visual language of domestic space, I refuse the notion that silence is virtue. These works transform quietness into testimony. They honor vulnerability as strength and visibility as an act of rebellion. Lingering Shadows asserts that women will not remain hidden, muted, or diminished. Instead, we emerge from the places where we were once confined, insisting on recognition, dignity, and voice.
This series stands as both a critique and a reclamation—an insistence that we cannot, and will not, be silenced.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nazanin Alipour Jeddi, known as Sitaaj, is an Iranian American photographer and translator based in New Hampshire, USA. Born in Tehran, she is a self-taught artist whose practice centers on the emotional and cultural dimensions of womanhood. Her work explores identity, memory, and the passage of time through carefully composed, often symbolic imagery. Drawing from her experiences between two cultures, Sitaaj creates visual narratives that reflect the tension between tradition and individuality, intimacy and distance.
In her ongoing series Lingering Shadows, she examines the invisible weight of domesticity and the inner worlds of women, offering a quiet yet powerful commentary on resilience and selfhood. Through photography, she seeks not only to document but to evoke — transforming silence and emotion into a shared visual language.
© Sitaaj