Hoda Afshar

Hoda Afshar (born 1983) is an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian Government.
Early life, education and early career.
Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran in 1983. She earned a Bachelor degree in Fine Art (Photography) at the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran, and began her career as a photographer in 2005. She moved to Australia in 2007, and completed her PhD in Creative Arts at Curtin University in 2019, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity".
Career.
Her first project, in 2005, was a series of black and white photographs documenting Tehran's underground parties called "Scene", but she could not show them in public.
Afshar's two-channel video work, "Remain" (2018), includes spoken poetry by Boochani and Iranian poet Bijan Elahi. Afshar describes her method as "staged documentary", in which the men on the island are able to "re-enact their narratives with their own bodies and [gives] them autonomy to narrate their own stories". The video was shown as part of the Primavera 2018 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, from 9 November 2018 to 3 February 2019. One of the photographs of Boochani taken for this project won the Bowness Photography Prize. This portrait, along with several others taken as part of the Remain project, are held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Afshar was the subject of a Compass program on ABC Television in 2019, and in the same year was a judge for the National Portrait Gallery's National Photographic Portrait Prize.
In March 2021, an exhibition of Afshar's portraits of nine whistleblowers was mounted at St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne, in an exhibition named "Agonistes" (after the Greek word "agonistes", meaning a person engaged in a struggle).
Afshar says that her work explores how photographs may be "used or misused by power systems create certain hierarchies between people"; and that "[documentary photography] is a visual language that has been formed and established through the lens of colonisation".
Current positions.
 Afshar teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne. She is also a board member of the Centre for Contemporary Photography. However, , she was stuck in London owing to the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions, having travelled to the UK for an artist residency.
Collections.
Afshar's work is held in the following permanent collections: