Rural life is a lifestyle, which despite many problems, is the choice of some people. This lifestyle has undergone several changes in the recent years. Industrialization of the country, unsustainable development of facilities, insufficient support for rural products, attractions of urban life, to name a few, have caused decrease of the rural population, and in some cases migration to cities (rural population decreased from 70% (according to the statistics of 1335) of the population to less than 28%.

Amir Ayyub is a small village in the Zagros Mountains between Fars and Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province in Iran. Majority of people of the village are Lor and stockmen. Due to the mountainous nature of the region, agriculture is not very prosperous. Most of the young people have migrated to the surrounding cities to work. Villagers face many difficulties, including lack of sanitation and distance from cities, inadequate educational facilities, long working hours, hard physical work, risking their lives to protect livestock from bears, leopards, wolves and hyenas, loss of their capital and cessation of the production cycle due to disease and consequent death of livestock, constant conflicts with nature to meet human needs such as protecting small wheat fields during the harvest season to prevent hogs attack, etc.

My good childhood memories of my father’s village, which is now almost desolate, and so many changes I have witnessed in the lives of the villagers, led me to start photographing the Ansari family in March 2019. This project is still ongoing.