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.