1979
Maziar Moradi

Hardbound, 10¾" x 8½", 96 pages
40 color illustrations
2010, Kehrer Verlag
Text by Ingo Taubhorn

From the Publisher:
The title of the award-winning photo series by young photographer Maziar Moradi refers to a fateful year for his homeland of Iran—1979. Moradi documents therein his family’s impressions, fears, and experiences in the days of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

Moradi was just four years old in 1979. Over the last several years he has gone back to this period and to Iran, reconstructing the fateful events that befell his family. He then started to make sketches for scripts and finally boiled down the scenes to the decisive moment that had changed the lives of those involved. With Moradi’s relatives re-enacting their own experiences, the stories are condensed into individual, telling images. Every photograph follows its own dramaturgy and structure. The detailed scenery as well as the use of light and color come together to create a one-of-a-kind pictorial language.

Maziar Moradi, winner of gute aussichten 2008/2009 (good prospects – young German photography), studied communication design with Vincent Kohlbecher at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. His works have received several distinctions, among them the Otto Steinert Prize of the German Photography Society and the Wuestenrot Foundation’s documentary photography award. 1979 was exhibited at PhotoEspana 2008, at the Festival Voies Off des Rencontres d'Arles, and at the Goethe Institute in Washington, DC.