As the year draws to a close and we reflect on the one that has passed, many of us also start forming a list of intentions for the year ahead. We sat down with PhotoVogue artist Carmen Daneshmandi, who has chosen to rethink the year itself, its structure and its celebrations, to question social and political realities through images and an everyday object: the calendar.
Her spiral-bound calendar-zine spans 13 months and highlights dates honoring underrepresented communities. It brings together portraits, writings, and mixed-media photography that capture the political and emotional zeitgeist of each month. Part of the proceeds will support the Sudan Solidarity Collective and initiatives aiding families affected by I.C.E.
Carmen reminds us that decolonization comes from everyday acts of care, attention, and resistance. We explore all of this and more in our conversation with her.
How did the idea of the calendar come about?
It comes from a few different places, each with their own weight of influence. I love to see photography and writing come together, music and photography come together. I love print, I love zines.
At the start of my photography in high school I was also always obsessively writing poetry. A teacher of mine had pulled me aside and put me on to the poetry slam scene. All of a sudden, at 15, I was on stage competing and performing spoken word pieces using metaphor to call out the U.S. education system and war on Iraq. Simultaneously, there was this observation I had growing up of my mother and her calendars she would buy from the grocery store. She’d always go for something visually aspirational like “Greek islands” (one day I’ll take her there) or “travel through Spain” (she’s from Sevilla and her Andalusian character is a big anchor in her very different American life). These calendars would be taped up to the left side of the stove and with her swirly angular handwriting she’d fill in each calendar with things like “Feria de abril” (an important cultural holiday in Andalucia) or “Norouz” (Persian New Year aka spring equinox - my dad is from Shiraz so we always celebrate).
This calendar zine is a synthesis of all of that. It’s a space I’ve created in my practice to introduce those expressions and influences to one another and see what can happen. To look at these objects of daily use we have in our homes and see how we naturally edit them to make sense of the culture of the space they exist in.
Is there a day or festivity that you like in particular that is usually absent in official, standard calendars?
I love having Norouz (Persian New Year, spring equinox) in there because that’s my personal place where it all started, shifting our time of renewal from January 1st to the 20th of March, despite whatever Western standards may dictate. That IS when our new year begins. I also love forcing the absence of colonial dates… immediately deleting Columbus Day, that’s first to go. Putting in Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Rewriting 4th of July to “burn a flag today”. The best part is each year I do an open call and have people submit dates of importance that I may not already have. This year I added Somali Independence Day, Sant Jordi, Cecilia Gentili Day, all the new moons and full moons. There’s too many to list and I love having them all printed in there! I want everyone to be reflected and for there to be a shared space of discovery of what matters to you and what matters to me.
Would you tell us more about how you selected the images and how your creative process worked?
It’s honestly an incredibly intuitive process. There will be these sharp points throughout the year that stick out to me like - oh this portrait feels special, oh those words, oh this headline, oh this song - and I’ll go on saving them into a folder for when I finally sit down to start the zine. Sometimes there are people who I meet weeks before I start the process and I know I need to photograph them, letting them choose a month that means something to them (sometimes its cultural, sometimes its their birthday, etc). By the time I sit down with all those pieces it feels like I’m digging up a time capsule that is going to tell me about the year we just lived and what we can take with us into the next. I never actually know what each zine will look like. I just know structure: front and back cover, introduction of personal writing reflecting on the year in English and non-gendered Spanish with accompanying images, 13 months (because I want it to be a January to January calendar, let people ease into that new year) each with their own image, handwritten caption poem, and hand-picked song (a QR code you scan on the page).
The rest is discovery. There are hours of just sifting through that gathered material and seeing if there’s a reaction. So much of it is a physical response. Does this image of this person become strengthened when you arrive to April? What’s going on in September that they can reflect back? There’s also this really fun technique that’s come up from doing the zine now for six years, (that process I showed you back in New York) of fusing place with portrait to create these really textural new images. It can be absurd but following the instinct has been such a vital part of the character building of each month. A portrait of my friend Justine taken in their apartment in New York blended into a portrait of my kitchen in Barcelona where the pendant lamp hangs perfectly above their eyelid and all of a sudden they have this yellow lamp eye shadow.
Then comes the feeling into words, handwritten: My friend Justine makes me feel safe like quiet mornings in my kitchen. And it does! They do! It all makes sense! I just discovered the gravitational force, this is the equation, that’s the . The image always comes first, then the written. Metaphor leads the way. It feels Dadaist almost, like that game Exquisite Corpse. This image is the torso, the writing is the head, the song is the feet. It reveals itself each time.
This project is deeply rooted in politics, like all your practice. You did this calendar last year, too: is there an image you chose for a month that turned out to be perfectly fitting for the political environment of that time?
Yes! The cover. It’s of a shattered window in my neighborhood that I would pass everyday on the way back home. For weeks it’s been roped off with this caution tape and still hasn’t been fixed but the light hits it beautifully. You can get so close to its sharp edges and look into the building and it’s clearly vandalism. When I layed it out I struggled with even placing the title over the image so I left it out, just image. Last minute I pulled this image I took in New York’s Diamond District of a closed shop window at night that reads “DIVINE” in blue and it was perfect to layer with the image of the shattered window. They live in the same world now. My feelings of class disruption and billionaires and needing to be more pointed and sharp with our actions are all there.
Could you tell us more about the organisations you decided to donate part of the proceeds to?
I chose Sudan Solidarity Collective because I wanted to step up my efforts towards a cause that hadn’t been getting much reach or attention and had a few people recommend the same group that could be vouched for. Last year I managed to donate $600 between mutual aid groups for Gaza and S.W.O.P. Behind Bars’ Black Trans Liberation campaign. For as long as I can afford to, I will always try to find a way for this project to go towards a different initiative so people can also get to know them too.
Is there a wish you have for 2026 as an artist?
To come out of hiding and give visibility to my work and connect with the right people so that I don’t have to do this all on my own. My work has saved me multiple times from the depths of a personally difficult year so I’m really focused right now. I love this work and I see the way it impacts people, the response it gets, and I am firm in my vision. I know my unique worth, this mix of writing and photography and zine making and cultural knowledge, lived experiences, song choices, all that.
This Calendar Zine has been a full on self-published production I’ve done on my own for six years now and with the encouragement (and helping hands of friends and family!) I am so grateful I still push through and get it done. It’s reached 65 cities and 7 countries all by word of mouth...imagine if I had a team’s support! How would the images grow! Imagine what each and every iteration of that looks like through the vessel of different clients and collaborators and the creative questions being asked of me? I have so much to give and so much to say and I am ready to reintroduce myself and strengthen the bond between my practice and myself, to find my creative matches out in the world. I believe in it. Let’s find each other.
The Calendar-zine is available on Carmen Daneshmandi s website: https://www.carmendaneshmandi.com/shop/the-2026-calendar-zine
