She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian government.

[3] Her first project, in 2005, was a series of black and white photographs documenting Tehran's underground parties called Scene, but she could not show them in public.

[2] Her first solo exhibition, Behold (2017, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne), comprised a set of grainy photographs of men in a gay bathhouse taken in Iran in 2016.

[3][4] Afshar's two-channel video work, Remain (2018), includes spoken poetry by Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and Iranian poet Bijan Elahi.

[11] Afshar's book Speak the Wind (2021) documents the landscapes and people of the islands of Hormuz, Qeshm, and Hengam, in the Persian Gulf off the south coast of Iran.

[1][15] From September 2023 to January 2024, the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted an exhibition of Afshar's work over the past decade, A Curve is a Broken Line.

[19][2] Afshar says that her work explores how photographs may be "used or misused by power systems create certain hierarchies between people"; and that "[documentary photography] is a visual language that has been formed and established through the lens of colonisation".