Amin Yousefi, born in 1996 in Abadan, Iran, is an Iranian artist, writer, and curator based in London. Working across photography, archival material, text, moving image, and installation, his practice examines how photographs mediate political events and historical experience. He is particularly interested in the relationships between the photographer, the photographed subject, the viewer, and the institutions through which images are produced, circulated, classified, and preserved.
Yousefi grew up in Abadan, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, a major centre of Iran’s oil industry and a region profoundly shaped by the Iran-Iraq War and its aftermath. This history informs his wider engagement with photography in relation to conflict, political memory, and the representation of history. His work frequently begins with existing images and documents, which he rephotographs, reconstructs, annotates, sequences, or recontextualises to examine how their meanings and functions change over time. Across his practice, Yousefi is concerned with the authority conventionally assigned to photographs and with moments when that authority becomes unstable. His work considers the photograph as a site of exchange between those who make images, those who appear within them, and those who encounter them later. Questions of gaze, evidence, visibility, surveillance, and historical distance recur throughout his projects, alongside an interest in how photographs move between personal, political, archival, and institutional contexts. Rather than approaching the archive as a fixed account of the past, he examines the processes through which photographs are selected, framed, reproduced, circulated, and made to signify.
These concerns are central to projects including Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth, which revisits photographs of the 1979 Iranian Revolution to examine the reciprocating gaze between photographer and subject, and Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition, which draws on a state-issued Iranian civil defence textbook to consider how institutional images organise and represent the body. Across both projects, Yousefi examines how photographs continue to act beyond the moment of their production, acquiring new meanings through viewing, interpretation, circulation, and reuse.
In 2026, Yousefi received the C/O Berlin Talent Award in the Artist category for Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition. In 2024, he received the Royal Photographic Society Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography and was selected as a Foam Talent. His work has been presented internationally at institutions and platforms including Museum Kunstpalast, Fotografisk Centre, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Foam Museum, Belfast Photo Festival, and Peckham 24. His debut photobook, Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth, featuring an essay by David Campany, was published by Luhz Press in 2026.