Danske eventyr i Iran

Danske eventyr i Iran tells the stories of Danes who, in small and larger ways, left traces in Iran at different moments in history. The book brings together people, places, documents, photographs and fragments of lived experience.

Morten Hansted had worked on the project for several years and gathered an enormous amount of visual material. At the beginning, that material felt almost overwhelming — not because it lacked quality, but because it came from so many different sources, periods and formats.

My task was to give the material a calm and generous structure. I worked with a grid-based layout that allowed the images to dominate without making the pages feel crowded. The book needed air, but not distance.

The photographs carry much of the historical presence. They lead the reader into the period almost immediately, so the layout had to support that movement rather than explain too much around it.

Some of the documents were reproduced as objects rather than flat images — placed on the page as if they were papers lying on a white surface, with subtle shadows. It breaks the strictness of the grid and gives parts of the book a slightly scrapbook-like feeling.

That small shift was important. It makes the archive feel less institutional and more personal — as if the reader is looking through papers and photographs left behind by people who were actually there.