My name is Mojtaba Darvishi Cohan — a name chosen for me by my parents.

After emigrating, despite the difficulties and the occasional feeling of being overlooked because my name was unfamiliar to many, I chose not to change it. I kept it because I wanted to respect the choice my parents had made for me.

I inherited my family name from my grandfather — a European merchant who came to Iran for business, fell in love, stayed, and changed both his first and family names.

I was born in April 1970, in Bandar Anzali, a small and beautiful coastal city in northern Iran, on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

As far back as I can remember, everything was visual to me. Image was not simply a way of seeing; it was a way of thinking. My mind was always filled with images, and almost everything eventually became an image — even sounds.

Drawing, painting, photography, writing, and later cinema and graphic design all became ways of exploring that same visual world. My writing, more than an attempt to create poetry or stories, was often a way of describing an image — something I could not always capture with a camera, a pencil, or any other medium, and had to build with words instead.

Music has always existed alongside these images, as if it were the colour that fell across them.

I studied photography, cinema and graphic design, but I have never been able to define myself by just one of them. Perhaps because, to me, they are all different ways of doing the same thing: seeing, imagining, and creating.

Now I am in Finland, among quiet and patient people, far from the city where I was born. Caught between the gravity of calm and the storm of being away from home; and perhaps this tension will give birth to another explosion of images.

I don't know. But I keep imagining.

Still in love with all things beautiful.