“The Whale”: Shahram Saadat’s Surreal Portraits Through a Car Wash

In The Whale, his 2024 photo series, British-Iranian photographer Shahram Saadat transforms the ordinary ritual of a car wash into a stage for quiet reflection and aesthetic surprise. Shot in car washes across southern England, these images subvert expectations: rather than crisp commercial snaps, Saadat produces abstract, dreamlike portraits that linger in the mind.

Distorted Faces, Painterly Portraits

Saadat’s approach is deceptively simple: photograph people inside their cars while the water, soap and spray cascade over the windows. The resultant streaks, bubbles, refractions and blurs dissolve the hard edges of a face and turn each subject into a near-painterly form. The windshield becomes a filter and distortion surface, allowing him to create abstracted portraits of people in transit—caught yet concealed.

Stillness Between Motion

A central tension in The Whale is the interplay between motion and pause. The car wash itself is dynamic—motors hum, jets of water spiral, brushes swirl—but each photograph captures a fleeting instant of stillness. For a few moments, time seems suspended as the subject is held behind glass, washed over, detached from the rush of the outside world. Saadat frames the car wash, typically a utilitarian, unremarkable experience, into a moment of introspection.

Intimacy and Isolation

By photographing through glass and rushing water, Saadat engenders a simultaneous intimacy and distance. The viewer glimpses emotion—an expression, a gesture—but always through a membrane. Saadat told VICE that “the apparatus and the dichotomy it poses creates a useful filter between the photographer and the subject, giving them a sense of distance.” At the same time, he said, these barriers allow for creative possibilities by enabling his subjects to “express themselves freely.” The result is a delicate oscillation between closeness and detachment.

Art from the Mundane

One of the striking achievements of The Whale is how Saadat elevates a banal, everyday moment into something poetic. In transforming the car wash—a routine, functional act—into “staged time capsules,” he forces us to reconsider the beauty hidden in mundanity. Saadat told VICE that he first considered photographing rituals like showering or tooth brushing, but those acts were too brief, too often hurried. The car wash, however, provided a guaranteed three- to five-minute window in which a person is compelled to stop and remain still. In that forced pause lies the creative space he explores—a moment he describes as “a moment of respite.”

About the Artist

Shahram Saadat is based in London and is the founder of the experimental publishing house Duende Print. His practice weaves together documentary impulse and conceptual staging, often drawing from everyday observations and human idiosyncrasies. Early in his career, he pursued documentary photography—capturing life’s eccentricities in a raw, spontaneous fashion—but gradually shifted to a more deliberate, controlled mode of working that retains those spontaneities. As he told VICE, one early proof of concept came when he photographed a friend on a static exercise bike in the middle of a busy London road—an absurd, staged image that nonetheless echoed his documentary instincts.

In The Whale, Saadat channels that balance of the spontaneous and the composed. The sequences of car wash frames are not entirely staged, but rely on orchestrated conditions—location choice, timing, lighting—under which natural, unpredictable distortions can emerge. The subject is part performance, part surrender to the elements.

Why The Whale Resonates

• Emotional ambiguity: The obscured faces invite projection. Each viewer might see joy, melancholy, pensiveness—or something else entirely.
• Temporal tension: Though the experience is brief, the images expand the moment, making us linger on what would otherwise pass by unnoticed.
• Visual poetry: Through water, glass and light, Saadat turns the functional into the surreal, reminding us that beauty often hides in the everyday.
• Conceptual depth: The series asks a subtle question—when are we permitted to stop optimising, even for a few seconds? That forced pause, the inability to act for a moment, becomes a space for reflection.

The Whale was featured in VICE Magazine’s 2024 Photo Issue, introducing Saadat’s vision to a wider audience and cementing his reputation as a photographer capable of transforming ordinary human experiences into moments of lyrical abstraction.

Conclusion

In The Whale, Shahram Saadat invites us to pause—literally—during the humdrum of daily life. Through abstracted, water-filtered portraits, he captures a liminal zone where the routine becomes meditative, where distortion births beauty, and where silence is found in movement. His work reminds us that even in the most utilitarian of acts—a car wash—there lies potential for poetry.

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