Photos From Iran: Morteza Nikoubazl

Laurie says:

I saw a group of images by Iranian photographers in an article from In Focus by Alan Taylor in the Atlantic.  I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while but other things kept coming up.

Iran has appeared in numerous headlines around the world in recent months, usually attached to stories about military exercises and other saber-rattlings, economic sanctions, a suspected nuclear program, and varied political struggles. Iran is a country of more than 75 million people with a diverse history stretching back many thousands of years. While over 90 percent of Iranians belong to the Shia branch of Islam — the official state religion — Iran is also home to nearly 300,000 Christians, and the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel. At a time when military and political images seem to dominate the news about Iran, I thought it would be interesting to take a recent look inside the country, to see its people through the lenses of agency photographers. Keep in mind that foreign media are still subject to Iranian restrictions on reporting

Much of the work is very impressive and the whole slide show is worth seeing. I was particularly struck by the work of Morteza Nikoubazl.

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This is from the Lightstalkers (see below) web site:

Morteza Nikoubazl was born in Tehran in 1974 and studied art and photography there. Nikoubazl started work as a freelance photographer for Iranian daily and weekly newspapers then moved to the United Arab Emirates newspaper Gulf News. In 1999 he began working with the Reuters team as a stringer and now works exclusively with Reuters Tehran team.

This bio is not that recent but he is still working for Reuters.  There are lots of his images on the web but not a lot about him in English.

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This photo is from a very different series titled Lightstalkers . You really want to look at the entire series. They are very reminiscent some of Josef Sudek’s work. He is one of my favorite photographers and I wrote this post about him on his birthday a while ago.

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And one more photo I liked a lot that that was simply tagged Reuters.

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