The Whale is a quiet observational study of individuals passing through a car wash in a remote British town. Each subject is captured within the same confined, transient space, forced to remain still for the duration of the wash as water, foam and machinery move rhythmically around them. Cut off momentarily from the outside world, the car becomes a sealed environment, neither here nor there, where time slows and attention turns inward.
This three-minute cycle becomes an unexpected pause: a place to reflect, rest, plan and ask what comes next. In a modern landscape defined by constant connectivity and pressure to be productive, the car wash offers a rare, imposed stillness. The Whale frames this brief interlude as a moment of quiet resistance, a temporary suspension of urgency where doing nothing is not only allowed but unavoidable.
If there is a universal way to reset energy, common to all eras and cultures, it is undoubtedly purification through water. Cleansings, purges, or healing rites—many regeneration ceremonies feature water as a primordial, healing and soothing element.
In The Whale (the name of a car wash), British-Iranian photographer Shahram Saadat transforms a car wash into the stage for an everyday experience bordering on a trance. Between humour and absolute seriousness, between external movement and inner stillness, between the meditative attitude typical of sacred spaces and the tedium of downtime in a place as banal as a petrol station, Saadat captures his subjects suspended in limbo, a liminal space of lost gazes and expressionless faces. Surreal, poetic, and unsettling, his images move away from the portraiture and documentary work he began his career with, moving towards abstract painting and conceptual art. An ordinary experience becomes a threshold between worlds, a moment of transition from which one emerges with both spirit and car renewed.
María Ptqk
Curator, Getxophoto 2026
Born in Paris in 1995, Shahram Saadat is a Bristish-Iranian photographer based in London. His work is inspired by a constant interest in human idiosyncrasies and the silent tensions that lurk in everyday life. Underpinned by conceptual thinking, Saadat’s work explores themes such as identity, displacement, and the performative nature of social behavior, inviting the viewer to question what is real, rehearsed, or unconsciously revealed within the photographic frame. Shahram is also the founder of Duende, an experimental publishing house and non-profit gallery founded in 2015 that showcases emerging talent from image makers, sculptors, designers, and writers, and collaborates with local communities to offer educational workshops.
Getxophoto is an image festival created and managed by Begihandi, that has been taking place in Getxo—Basque Country, Euskadi—since 2007. This festival is part of a cultural ecosystem with the aim of being more participatory, hybrid, committed and sustainable. This thematic Festival is conceived as a platform that addresses contemporary challenges through different proposals, from visual storytellers around the world, in an attempt to create spaces for reflection and establish a collective conversation. Getxophoto is characterized by the radical defense of public space (both physical and online). For this reason, most of its programme is composed of outdoor installations, highlighting, on the one hand, the link between the image and the environment and, on the other, generating a more horizontal and participatory relationship with the public.
This year, after PAUSE, PLAY and REC, the festival reaches a milestone: its 20th edition. The common thread for this anniversary edition could only be… RESET—a button that invites us to reboot the system. Anniversaries are moments to celebrate and rejoice, but also excellent opportunities to look back and take stock, to review our archives and get a glimpse of what we have changed; and equally a time to project forward with renewed energy, just as when soil is ploughed so that seeds can be sown again. The edition therefore welcomes proposals that address experiences of change, reworking, recycling and reinvention; of life cycles and celebrations; of individual or collective stories of resetting—a system reboot in any of its many forms.
María Ptqk is the curator of GETXOPHOTO 2026.
Copyright © Shahram Saadat and Getxophoto, all rights reserved
