It all started when I was confronted with the hospital environment and knew I had the potential to spread the virus to my family. So in this hard situation, I decided to separate from them and enter in self-imposed quarantine.
This is the only home furniture in which I have been quarantined. I sit on it throughout the day and do my daily chores. The day after I started quarantine, I sat down on this sofa and thought about this year's disasters and the futureless.
During the quarantine period, I chose to watch the film to forget over time. In the past, I used to watch movies with my friends or family, and that often made me remember my problems and loneliness.
Before the spread of the Coronavirus and Quarantine, I didn't care about the flowers and the plants, but by the time I looked at them, I was thinking about the meaning of life and that they were living away from the world's confusion.
I didn't care about cleaning the house and where it has not to be polluted but now cleaning is part of my daily routine and even fun.
Gloves, alcohol, thermometers, and detergents have become a necessity in our lives, though they weren't my priority before, and I didn't even think about buying and keeping them.
It's New Iranian year and I set up a seven-tray table with what I could find at home. For the first time, I understood the meaning of loneliness. I was lonely at the moment when every Iranian wishes to be alone with his family and loved ones, and I realized more and more that no one would not know for a moment what would happen next.
Most of the time I stay by the window for hours until night. The streets have always been crowded and lively since this time of year. It is the happiest time of the year, but now the strange silence and shadow of the death of the city have spread and there is no laughter or joy.
I take my writings and plans on overseas migration out of my bag and look at them and think about the weirdness of life and how in a few weeks all my planning for the next years of my life has been shattered.
Sometimes I look at Salafis and photos I've taken with my friends in the past, and I miss those crowds and ask myself if I can see them again.
In this situation, the only way I can get in touch with a friend is by giving me a series of necessities in front of the door and after he leaves, I take the items and clean them with a disinfectant solution.
Every night I hear the neighbor's voice from a small window in the house. Being a neighbor in the past has not been so intense for me that now even the light of another house has become blind to hope.
If things get even worse and food declines, people will forget each other and go back to primitive times when food would become the primary human need and then we all become alone.
Time no longer makes sense to me as it used to be in a normal situation, and second to second it was valuable to me, and to me, it is uneven and unimportant. Maybe our heart burns for our lost times and the times we could have been together.
The boring repetition of the days that we are all going through is getting harder and harder for me and now I think more about the situations I missed.
With all the hardships, worries and anxieties of this era, I look to the future and look forward to a day that may be brighter than my dark past and return to my friends and family again.
The first day I heard about Corona's arrival in Iran, I decided to cover this international crisis in Iran. In the following days, I was allowed to take photos at one of the covid-19 reference hospitals. That night, I took off my gloves and a non-standard normal mask and went to the hospital. I was going to take photos of cleaning up the hospital environment by Revolutionary guards. While photographing disinfection, I was confronted with the unhealthy environment of the hospital. The corpses of people who had died with covid-19 had been released throughout the hospital yard, and the patients' companions were freely moving around without any care. I was very scared because I didn't have the proper equipment for that situation and I was worried about the transmission of the disease to my family. So after taking my photos, I called one of my friends and decided to quarantine myself at his house for a while so that I would not be transmitted the disease to other members of my family, especially my mother who had pulmonary problems if I got the disease. The next day, I was sitting alone at my friend's house thinking that something very wrong had happened this year. The terrible floods of April, the popular protests in November with 1300 deaths, the destruction of the unmanned passenger plane and the now-infamous enemy that is killing a large number of people every day and now I have to remain in self-imposed quarantine and all of my plans for the future I had been blown away by my summer immigration from Iran to my photography projects, and my future no longer mattered to me and I didn't know what to do. I was very angry and scared. Angry because I'm in a country where mismanagement fails to kill people and their dreams, and I was afraid of a futureless and what else will happen in the new year.

Ashkan Shabani

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