Between 2017 and 2022, my life was divided between Iran and Afghanistan. Even now, I am not sure whether those movements were closer to fleeing my homeland or searching for refuge. I only know that during those years, Afghanistan with all its wounds, uncertainties, and complexities gave me a sense of social and political safety that I experienced less in Iran. These photographs were made during work journeys, while filming documentaries and fiction films, and in the brief intervals between productions. During those years, the camera was not only a tool for recording. It became a way of staying with a world that felt both close and unfamiliar, culturally near and historically unsettled. Fragments of Nearness does not approach Afghanistan as a news image, a landscape of suffering, or a distant subject for an outside gaze. The series grew out of living and working within a space where exile, refuge, risk, cultural nearness, estrangement, memory, and everyday life existed side by side. These images are an attempt to come close without possessing; to see without reducing. Afghanistan is not held here as a fixed meaning, but appears as a relation between place, people, time, and gaze. This archive is not closed for me. It remains part of a path that shaped the way I see, and continues to stay connected to my present and future work.