I knew the high aesthetics of his work. But what above all had resonated with my soul from the beginning was the light of his photographs. Each immortalised form – human or otherwise – was as if bathed in a magical light that was always there, with a quality such that it was impossible to attribute it to mere artistry. This unique light could only emanate from deep layers.

While we work and his lens is focused on me, my attention is on him and on what surrounds him – his movements, his space, his things – we explore each other.

In the little time we have left to drink a coffee and put aside the strict, so far serious professionalism, I simply confirm what I had imagined. In front of me stands an intelligent, insightful, inventive man, a free spirit and a deep passion, a humanitarian and a creature very capable of loving.

He captures beauty everywhere, whenever and wherever he encounters it, be it in a person, in a landscape, in an “object” (even if the word is put in quotation marks in a world that is animistic for both of us) he wraps it with love, reverence and devotion, as if it were the holiest thing, the most powerful fuel or analgesic, the quintessence. The forms, the perceivable, are for him the epitome of the hyper-real and their beauty is as necessary as breath.

He shows me the leather holsters he makes for his pistols, a new passion he has devoted himself to, forgetting even to sleep or eat. And as it unfolds, I realise that I am dealing with a versatility and an inexhaustible potential, galloping on tigers.

Not surprising, on the contrary, the most normal thing for Cassi to be his wife. The performer and lyricist of Bad Mathematics, the Jamaican enchantress, the sweeping wave of fearless and primal eroticism, who drags the other three and the audience into a Dionysian ritual.

There was not the slightest intention for the interview that follows and that a few days later I wanted, in turn, to propose to him, since, without a doubt, Vishy Moghan is one of those who elevate life and man.

Yes, I was born in 1960, in Tehran. My mother was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Tehran, with a degree in Graphic & Fine Arts. My father was a pilot, first with the Air Force and later with a private company called Air Taxi. He was, by all accounts, an excellent aviator. Flying was a key feature of my family, as my mother’s father was also one of the first five founders of the Iranian Air Force. I grew up with aviators and people who gave their lives in the service of the country, so Iran will always be a place of pride for me.

From a very young age, however, I reacted to the ideal of patriotism; since then I considered it a dangerous and inappropriate “philosophy”. Too often, people who preach it misinterpret its meaning. Instead of receiving it as love of their country, they confuse it with the belief that their own country is better than all others, which is completely ridiculous.

My reaction to both patriotism and the insignificance of religious beliefs was, in a way, the foundation of my worldview. My aunt, who was only seventeen years older than me, was the person who exerted the strongest influence on my life. Her sensibilities and attitude towards life shaped my thinking enormously.

As for Iran’s influence, I think it was mainly the vastness, scale and changing landscape that created in me an abiding love for the great country. Mountains, deserts, rivers, lands, jungles and beaches gave birth to my desire for movement and travel.

A pivotal moment was a long journey I took with a guide through the heart of the country, from Tehran to the Gulf. We passed through some of the most incredible scenery I have ever seen. We traveled some two thousand kilometers• from the mountains of the north, through the central desert, towards the Persian Gulf. I saw her magical Salt Lakescentral desert to light up the sky like diamonds, the rugged and arid rocky mountains of Western Iran and the shockingly green river valleys.

I saw the shameful poverty of people living in the cities, right next to some of Iran’s richest industries. Imagine seeing a scrawny little girl on the streets, her belly swollen from hunger, with one of the world’s largest oil refineries in the background. This abnormal combination of natural beauty and social wretchedness and injustice became for me an emblem of the country, maybe even of the world.

To this day, we encounter the same phenomenon everywhere • abject poverty in the face of untold wealth. When I was a child, my grandmother’s brother told me about how the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) exploited the native Iranians to extract oil from the desert; enslaved them, all for the benefit and profit of the West. He himself left Iran, unable to bear to see his country being drained. I knew all about the shah’s dictatorship; I knew that many of my people had been imprisoned by the secret police just because they had expressed a negative opinion about the monarch.

So I have fond, fond memories of Iran, always mixed with horror at the socio-political realities that plagued the place. The revolution of 1978-9 was the only glimmer of hope but, within a short period of time, it was subverted and turned into a completely new kind of dictatorship, perhaps far worse than the monarchy.

My mother was a spiritual person. He filled our house with art books and music. In the early years of my life I listened exclusively to classical music. My father, on the other hand, was more familiar with the modern sounds of the time. I was, I remember, nine years old when he came home with Isaac Hayes’ second album: “Hot Buttered Soul”. It was a shock to my system!

Listening to funk for the first time, where I only knew modern western music that my teenage aunts listened to, changed me radically. Of course I knew the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and other great musicians of the pop scene… but this incredible thing called funk… it was like it was from another planet• it was a revelation! It led me to the discovery of Blues and Jazz, both of which changed me as a person forever.

As for the influence of women in my early years and later, I was blessed to be surrounded, from birth, by incredibly creative and intelligent women. The aunt I mentioned above remains one of the strongest and most intelligent people I know.

In 1993 and while you are an assistant director on behalf of the BBC in London, you meet Cassi. Since then you have been friends in life and art. What made this woman your muse and partner?

I met Cassi while I was assistant director on a documentary about her theater company in London. The magnetism between us was instant, something the rest of the cast and crew noticed long before we did. Cassi combines everything I value in a human being.

Her free spirit, inexhaustible creativity, integrity and intelligence, genuine artistic talent and generosity are exemplary to me. She is my best friend, my partner in my artistic endeavors and, needless to say, the most important person in the world to me.

When we met, Cassi had been acting and directing in physical theater for a decade and was a key member of the legendary Black Mimo Drama. Their work was improvisational, very physically and mentally demanding. She has a gift as a writer, she is a great actress, but most of all she has an amazing ability to understand narrative. That’s something that I think was key to the way we related—this deep love and respect for storytelling and finding creative ways to communicate it.

I have always considered it the main task of the artist to be a guardian of the stories of humanity. The best art in our cultures is that which tells a story about who and what we are. We both share a deep love of language. We stimulate each other on many levels, which is why we enjoy each other’s closeness. One of the most characteristic examples is our band, Bad Mathematics.

The men in my family were a lot like men everywhere. Fragile me who did value manhood but who at the same time remained few in comparison to her women, which made me hold woman in high esteem from an early age.

I started playing bass at the age of twenty. I was then playing with various musicians for fun and improvising. When I came to Greece, in 1993, I left my instrument with some friends in London and for about seven years I didn’t play at all. It happened and they finally visited us having taken the initiative to bring me my bass. This again coincided with the fact that my fraternal friend Michalis and his best friend from school and many other bands from back in the day were setting up a small studio in the backyard of Michalis’ house, right across from our house.

One day, somewhere in 1999, we met like this to play. I had written, for my own pleasure, two songs which Cassi suddenly began to sing. Then, as we continued, he began improvising lyrics over the music we were playing and, to everyone’s surprise, we seemed to have an unerring instinct for playing together. Although in its infancy, we had the feeling that we had been playing together for years. And so, we arranged to play on Friday nights and soon had quite a lot of improvised songs on top of completed tracks.

It spread to friends who were starting to show up to rehearsals and dance wildly in our small space. Soon, they started urging us to give a live. In 2001 we gave in and booked a concert in a small live bar in Athens. To our delight, the inevitable happened and it was a resounding success. From there we just continued to participate more and more in the live scene of Athens. Once we started playing in the now unfortunately closed small music theater in the city center, there was no going back. We built a very small but dedicated audience that never missed a show.

The fact that our music was, in a way, so personal to each of the four of us, such an incredible expression of our different roots and at the same time was, as someone once called it, the “United Nations of music”, didn’t bother me. it surprised and it doesn’t surprise me. What I said applies here. I don’t accept the idea that there are different cultures that separate us. I think that human culture, with all its colors, is exactly what unites us, something that is perfectly expressed in this gift called music. Music, like mathematics, is pure truth. It tells our story as human beings, no matter where we come from.

As for selling, to put it bluntly, I don’t think the four of us are biologically capable of it. It’s not a matter of principle; it’s just not in our DNA. Not that the Greek market in particular is not extremely suspicious of indigenous cultural products that break the norms of Greek data art. The ancient forms, the moment they are presented with something Western produced here, are greatly discredited. It is a kind of national insecurity syndrome. And it is destructive to the cultural scene of the country.

The Woman Project has many roots. One of them is the trivial fact that in 2010, due to the global financial crisis, I was unemployed and although tragic, it opened the way for me to look for my next personal project. This project marked both my return to photography and a way to explore my position on many of the issues raised about how women are represented and manipulated in our so-called culture.

With this particular project I wanted to resolve several issues. Something important I wanted to study was what beauty means and how it differs from attraction. There is a clear distinction there that I felt, and still feel, needs clarification.

Another defining factor that influenced the project was the simple fact that I had reached that age where you start to wonder where you are now, at that point in your life • what we usually call a “mid-life crisis”.

I have always had very good relations with women and, I would hope, I have never been exploitative or abusive towards any of them. Seeing how women were treated in the media and the extent to which we continued to judge women according to such narrow parameters, I felt it my duty to question this concoction.

In many ways, this project also explored my own position in relation to women, both in terms of how I reacted to them and how, in turn, they perceived me. These and more motivated me to see if I could make some progress on them through my capacity as a photographer. The Woman Project continues and has gone through many phases since its inception in 2011 until today.

Look, I have my clear intentions as a reaction to the macho treatment of women as mere, usable, objects, squeezed into narrow roles assigned to them by men and by commercial expediency. I wanted to see real women, not plastic imitations of women and puppets that wrongly perform social stereotypes.

However – and this is very important to emphasise – I am still a man who is attracted to women, and this does not make me, in many ways, the best person to answer questions that men stopped asking long ago. I don’t think a man is qualified to be a solution to women’s issues. The role of men here is to plug it and listen, and of course to assimilate what the women tell them.

Too often the issue of feminism is obscured by men who become the authority asked to judge it. Just in the same ridiculous way that the issue of racism is always given to white people to talk about in the media. In matters of inequality and injustice the one and only authority should be those subject to these limitations.

The fact that I was born in a Muslim country and live in a Christian country has never bothered me. In the first place, Iran was not the place that the west constantly presents through the media. It’s not a monolithic thing, and that’s essential to the way I perceive the world. We humans are first and foremost a single species. We all share the same basic needs and drives. Race, sex, religion, political beliefs should all be set aside as attributes of tertiary, at best, importance. Our first thought when dealing with matters of humanity should be our essential similarity.

It was never the goal of the Woman Project to answer questions of gender and representation. This is a personal opinion• of what I consider beauty and essential feminine qualities. But even that is not enough. I felt the need to explore how women today—at least those who were willing to work with me—wanted to show their femininity themselves, essentially their humanity. And as it stands it is still a very difficult undertaking. Expanding it into something so massive that it answers the question of the role of women in history and society is far beyond the capabilities of a small work, no matter how big the particular project is.

But yes, for me personally as a man, women do have something akin to magic. A woman for me should have equal beauty and charm. I’ve been blessed to have many wonderful girlfriends in my life, but that doesn’t make me qualified to answer the big questions of femininity. These are all I haveis. There is no portrait that is not also a self-portrait, no written or theatrical character that is not also a side of the author. Without a doubt, the artist represents the world through his eyes and thus is always, by nature, the protagonist of his own stories. This is not selfishness per se. It is human nature to see everything through the mirror.

My influences are countless. But a simple list would include, not necessarily in order of preference, Josef Koudelka, Edward Steichen, Erich Solomon, Don McCullin, Julia Margaret Cameron, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbot, Margaret Bourke White, Matthew Brady, Helmut Newton , Richard Avedon, August Sander, Gordon Parks, Seydou Keita, too many photographers to remember them all now!

Jimi Hendrix, Keith Jarret, Charles Mingus, David Byrne, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop, The Stooges, David Bowie, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Horace Silver, John Lee Hooker, The Pixies, Muddy Waters, Michael Nyman, Jethro Tull, The Cure, Fela Annikulapo Kuti, Kirstin Hirsch, Fiona Apple, Curtis Mayfield, Philip Barre, Blodwyn Pig, Son House, Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Cypress Hill and a bunch of other musicians!

By authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Joseph Heller, William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Iain Banks, Robert Graves, Mikhail Bulgakov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Alfred Jarry, the list goes on and on…

As for visual artists: Michael Angelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Brancusi, Henry Moore, Freida Kahlo, Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Egon Shiele, Max Ernst, Diego Rivera, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Juan Gris, Tamara de Lempicka , and again the list has no end!

“The darkroom and the studio,” you’ve said, “became my home in a way that nothing else could.” Tell me whatever and as much as you want and allow about this shelter and “home” of yours.

I have nothing more to add to this. I miss the darkroom everyday. But it is in the very nature of progress that once we enter the next stage of our evolution it is almost impossible to return. The continuation of my abilities in the analog world of photography was interrupted by the advent of digital processes and as a person who embraced technology I entered it at its birth. So I don’t think a return to the “good old days” is possible.

Well, Cassi and I agree, as usual, that the only song that would fit is the only love song she has written about our relationship, “Fierce Love”