Faiz.

In his story, at twenty-three, Faiz was installing air conditioning in a warehouse in Ghala when a badly soldered pipe burst. He inhaled the gas without a mask and kept working for another twenty minutes, because there was only one joint left; he collapsed on the stairs. What followed were two days in the hospital, a debt of twelve hundred rials, and eight months sleeping in the van. That's where his rules hardened: never take a job he can't finish alone. The portrait doesn't tell that breaking point; only his calm, facing forward.

It's a front-facing portrait with a clean background: framed, it gains just the right presence of a small painting, and when someone walks into the room, it's the first thing they look at. It works well in an entryway or a hallway, without clashing with whatever's around it. Behind that calm is someone who learned that the shame of owing money resembles other, older shames; that's in his biography, not in the frame.