Women Photographers, Middle Eastern & North African Studies, General & Miscellaneous Travel Photography, Middle Eastern Travel Photography, Documentary Photography & Photojournalism, Iran - History, Women - Middle East & North Africa

Inge Morath: Iran

Name: Inge Morath: Iran
Author: Inge Morath
ISBN: 9783865216977

by Inge Morath (Photographer), Monika Faber, Robert Delpire, Azar Nafisi

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Overview

In 1956, Inge Morath (1923-2002) traveled to the Middle East for Holiday magazine. She wore the traditional chador and traveled alone most of the time. "It was difficult to photograph there as a woman," she later recorded. In this body of work, Morath's subjects range from politics and religion to work and commerce, from the shah's palace to the nomad's tent to Zoroaster's sacred shrine. She photographed Iran with the keen vision of an anthropologist, examining religious rituals, costuming, work, sport, music, art and theater in order to document "the continuity--or lack of it--between past and present," as she later put it. Morath's work in Iran presaged her later work in Spain, China and Russia, creating an extensive document of the clash between modernity and tradition in the postwar Middle East. Retrospectively, Inge Morath: Iran recalls a land and a culture that have been profoundly transformed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is a window into the past that provides a singular and timely perspective on Iran in the present.

Synopsis

Edited and preface by John P. Jacob. Text by Azar Nafisi, Monika Faber.

About the Author, Inge Morath

"Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. As a young woman, she joined the just-founded Magnum agency as an editor, and then in 1951 began taking her own photographs. After assisting Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher for two years and working independently throughout that time, she became a member of the agency in 1955. Throughout her life, Morath was a prolific diarist and letter writer, and in her extensive travels in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, China and the USSR, she kept copious written notes along with her many photographs. She married Arthur Miller in 1962 and settled in New York and Connecticut, though she continued to travel and publish photographic essays, pursuing both assignments and independent projects until her death in 2002."