Decades before becoming a news photo editor, my mom gave me my first editing assignments when I was a kid. We’d sit around the dining room table in our apartment in New York, rummage through boxes of pictures we brought with us from Tehran, and make albums — while she told stories of back home. Barred from returning to Iran after the 1979 Revolution, those images were our only gateway to our homeland. And those assignments taught me the importance of photographs at a young age.
In New York, my parents had a Pocket Instamatic, the small, thin rectangular cameras popular in the 70s and 80s. We took it with us everywhere we went. No occasion was too small to photograph. That camera was our version of the iPhone.
I hope you enjoy these photographs, mostly taken with my phone, of New Yorkers and the streets I grew up in.
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