On the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, off Iran’s southern coast, wind is not only weather. It is a presence that can enter a body, bringing illness and disturbance. That belief, and the traces it has left on the islands and their inhabitants, is the starting point of Hoda Afshar’s Speak The Wind, published by MACK in 2021.

The book attends to a history that is seldom spoken aloud: similar convictions in parts of Africa have led to the suggestion that the cult traveled to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. Afshar does not illustrate this thesis as a documentary argument. Instead, her photographs of landscapes, people, and rituals move between observation and evocation, testing how a camera might register a force that is felt rather than seen.

Across 168 pages, Speak The Wind treats photography as a means of registering both description and psychic attachment. The images are restrained and closely observed, resistant to easy conclusion; they attempt to give visible form to something that cannot be seen. That ambition—to photograph the wind—gives the book its structural tension. It is not a survey of a region or a belief system but a sustained effort to let atmosphere, place, and ritual press against the limits of representation.

For collectors of contemporary photobooks, the book matters because it extends the documentary tradition without abandoning its subjects. Afshar works with a subject that has rarely been given serious photographic attention, and MACK’s 168-page paperback, with flaps, gives the project room to unfold. It is a considered addition for readers interested in how photography handles intangible histories, and in work that treats belief, landscape, and memory as inseparable.