The eye in the picture is distracting, alarming, demanding all at once. It’s presumably female – the lashes mascaraed, the eyelids lined, the brows sculpted – and it’s open very wide, as if startled. Her face is no help in reading that emotion: it’s hidden in a dark shadow, the eye spotlighted in a bright circle of light. And then your own eye drifts around the rest of Ahmad Nateghi’s untitled black-and-white photograph and encounters new disorientations. A sliver of a woman’s face smiles in the lower-right corner of a frame, as if she’s peeking through a barely opened door. In the lower-left quadrant, a woman stands with her back to the camera; in front of her, a sign reads “THE PROFESSIONAL CHOICE.”

Read More: Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran