“The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless bored. Consumers droop.  They need to be stimulated, jump­started, again and again.  Content is no more than one of these stimulants.  A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness­just what is weakened by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography.  P.106

Media today however, has a much more “deadening feeling” effect than before when it was only limited to television and radio.  People are constantly being exposed to media on various devices such as phones, laptops, tablets and … .  We are all carrying a little times square in our hands.  Constantly checking what is going on around the world and specially in one’s left behind homeland is a great part of everyone's routine.  Once detached from somewhere that we once belonged to, this routine is practiced with a sense of guilt or bitterness; a sense of wanting to do something you are no longer able to do, but to sit there and watch, or at least beware of!  

This series of 11 photographs that I have taken in the past 5 years since I moved to Toronto from Tehran is part of a larger ongoing project that I aim to continue in the future.  As more people that I know immigrate to Toronto from Iran, or I meet new people who have moved within the past twenty years, I photograph them in their private or semi­private spaces.  All the news... portrays how we end the nights, which is also the morning of the next day in Iran, by checking out the news to either hear something good that makes us want to go back, or something bad, to secretly make us feel good about the decision to immigrate.