On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot out of the sky by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps minutes after takeoff from Tehran. All 176 people on board were killed. Most were Iranian, Iranian-Canadian, or dual citizens — students, families, professionals — and most were bound for Canada. For three days, the government called it an accident, a malfunction, anything but the truth. When it finally admitted, on January 11, what everyone already knew, the grief broke open into the streets.

I was there. Inside Iran, on those streets, at street level and in real time — and very few were. These photographs are what I brought back.

They were made in the days after the admission: crowds in the open, security forces, fire and tear gas and darkness. Candles held for the dead. The faces of people who had stopped waiting for permission to be heard. What the frames don’t show is what it cost to make them. There was one window — a single night, a single rally — when I could actually lift my camera and shoot. After that, it closed. There was no room for error. To be seen holding a camera was to make yourself a target, and the regime would not hesitate to fire on anyone caught with one in their hands. Every image here exists in the narrow space between silence and a bullet.

That is why the title means what it does to me. A Beacon When I’m Gone is about absence and persistence at once. A beacon doesn’t burn for itself. It burns so that someone else, somewhere in the dark, can find their way. If these pictures outlast me, let them do that work — let them stand as proof that this happened, that people stood in the open and refused, that 176 lives were never a malfunction.

This series belongs to a larger body of work I’ve spent a decade building: an ongoing document of Iranian society, of resistance, and of the human cost of authoritarian rule — made first-hand, from the ground.