Alfred’s Journey
Alfred Yaghobzadeh
Watch the meeting with Alfred Yaghobzadeh, moderated by Caroline Laurent-Simon https://cloud.imagesevidence.com/index.php/s/mCrNRyZBkjGZm3L
Winner of the 2023 La Saif-Benoît Schaeffer Publishing Grant for a Photography Book
Life for Alfred Yaghobzadeh is a garden where spring thunderstorms wake the dormant plants, but floods overturn the landscape. There are flowers and fruits of every color, taste, beauty, and nourishment at the same time as poisonous thorns that prick the gardener’s hands and lightning that breaks the backs of old, strong trees. His outlook is replicated in the way he approaches his life as a photographer and a photojournalist. A career spanning forty years began accidentally when his native country, Iran, was propelled into what became known as the Islamic Revolution.
In the late 1970s, the young Armenian-Assyrian growing up in a Muslim-majority country joined his friends and raised his fist against the monarchy. It did not take long for him to realize that he did not share the ideology of the protesters enthralled by Ayatollah Khomeini, their leader calling for austere Islamic laws. Yet he could not turn his back on the changes fast approaching. He grabbed a camera and began documenting the fate of his country.
When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, he worked for the Associated Press. He could not find himself bearing arms, but paid his dues with his photographs. While the Iranian government’s propaganda machine used the argument of holy war to recruit men, sometimes as young as thirteen, his lens focused on the human cost of combat. The most iconic is the picture of boy soldier Hassan “Jangju,” whose muddied face and small stature behind the heavy, oversized rifle echo the fright and incongruity of many soldiers like him. The way he experienced the war would become the way he documents other wars: not just bombs, tanks, and destruction, but the life that goes on despite the violence.
To a trained eye, these early photographs might not be perfect in composition or lighting, but they speak to the young photographer’s raw authenticity that belies his novice status. For example, the image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saluting his devotees in 1979 shows Yaghobzadeh’s potential to become a formidable force in capturing history’s most influential people and events. It is not the Ayatollah’s overbearing figure that maintains the visual interest, but his shadow on the wall. An eerie image predicts the future of a nation that is about to become a shadow of its former self.
Preview
Even though the revolution made Yaghobzadeh a photographer, a career that is so much more was awaiting him. It began with him leaving Iran in 1983. For the next fifteen years, he captured Lebanon’s civil war, Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile and her wedding, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the first Intifada, the visit to Cuba by Pope John Paul II, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the battle of Grozny in Chechny, where he was injured by a Russian tank shell, the famine in Somalia and the football World Cup in 1998. And there was more: fashion parades and major shows such as Madonna, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson at the Parc des Princes in Paris. Next he marked the turn of the century with the publication of Christianity Around the World, presenting the rituals and the many faces of Christians in countries such as Spain, Poland, Israel, the Philippines, and Ethiopia.
The first two decades of the 21st century were no different. Yaghobzadeh, in and out of conflicts and revolutions, continued to travel with his camera, sometimes on assignment, at other times at his own expense, seeing man-made disasters such as the disappearance of Zeugma, the ancient city flooded by the Birecik Dam in Turkey, or festivals and royal weddings. However, the most notable trip from this period must be his return to Iran after 23 years. The images from Iran, once again, show the faces which the government of the Islamic Republic tries to hide from the world. His works, The Two Faces of Women in Today’s Iran and The Kingdom of Mullahs in Islamic Iran, depict a young nation that is sexually liberated, socially defiant, and politically aware. For example, the image of three young women raising their green-painted fingers in the V for victory shows the excitement and hope that most Iranians had for a democratic presidential election in June 2009. It is no surprise that he also documented the other side of what has become known as the Iranian Green Movement: the peaceful protests, the crackdowns, violence, arrests, and deaths at the time.
Yaghobzadeh’s career has come full circle in the last five years: the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2018, the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and female Kurdish guerrilla fighters on the Iran-Iraq border in 2023. To understand his success, all his photographs must be looked at side by side. In war, he documents the endless violence and folly, but does not oblige the viewer to choose between beauty and horror. In times of peace, he brings out the glamor of fashion. When shooting ordinary lives, he is capturing small pleasures and being in the moment.
It is utterly impossible to fit Alfred Yaghobzadeh’s career into two pages. The photographs in this collection stand as proof of his versatility as an artist. But a question remains: how could he return to the job over and over again after seeing the worst of humanity? The answer is in his approach to life: a garden where you cannot pick and choose what you want to see. There will always be as many cloudy days as sunny ones.
Parisa Saranj, Writer and Translator
