lit a candle 3h agoJust read about this on a photography page I follow, had no idea who he was an hour ago and now I can't stop looking at the Paris Review portfolio. That white backdrop thing he did, the soldiers and grandmothers all lined up the same way. 67 is no age.
Their story
Mohsen Rastani was an Iranian documentary photographer and photojournalist whose black-and-white portraits of ordinary Iranians, posed against a plain white backdrop, became one of the best known bodies of work in contemporary Iranian photography. He photographed the Iran-Iraq War, the Lebanese Civil War and the Bosnian War, taught photography at…
Mohsen Rastani was an Iranian documentary photographer and photojournalist whose black-and-white portraits of ordinary Iranians, posed against a plain white backdrop, became one of the best known bodies of work in contemporary Iranian photography. He photographed the Iran-Iraq War, the Lebanese Civil War and the Bosnian War, taught photography at the University of Tehran, and spent more than two decades building his long-running series Iranian Family. He died on the morning of 25 October 2026, aged 67, after a period of illness.
Rastani was born on 27 December 1958 (6 Dey 1337 in the Iranian calendar) in Khorramshahr, the port city in Khuzestan province near the border with Iraq. As a young man he went to Tehran to prepare for the entrance examinations of the Faculty of Fine Arts. In November 1980 the Iraqi army captured Khorramshahr after long bombardment, and the city became known as Khuninshahr, the city of blood. When it was retaken in 1982, Rastani went home. He later told the Dutch newspaper NRC that the first thing he did was look for a rifle so he could help defend the city, until he realised that his camera was his weapon. Many of the neighbours he had photographed before leaving had been killed, and his prints were sometimes the last tangible proof that they had existed. Families kissed the photographs and kept them in their Qurans.
That experience shaped a career. Persian sources list him as a photographer for the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) from 1980, and in 1985 he became head of the photography unit of Jahad Daneshgahi at the University of Tehran. He completed a bachelor's degree in photography at the university's Faculty of Fine Arts in 1987 and later taught there. He served as photo editor of Tasvir magazine and of the newspaper Sobh-e Emrooz, was a founding board member of both the Iranian Press Photographers Association and the Iranian Photographers Association, sat on the policy council of the 11th Iranian Photography Biennial at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, judged national and international photography competitions, and wrote articles for the Iranian press.
His war work carried him far beyond Iran. After the Iran-Iraq War he photographed in Beirut during the late years of the Lebanese Civil War, and between 1994 and 1996 he worked in Sarajevo and across Bosnia and Herzegovina, recording everyday life during and immediately after the siege. Other projects documented Germany, Poland, Armenia and Kish Island, and he also worked in advertising photography. His book Zaman-e Sakht (The Hard Time), a collection of war photographs, was published in early 2015.
Rastani is best remembered for Iranian Family. Travelling through villages and crowded cities with a portable white screen, he set up makeshift studios, sometimes on the street itself, and invited passers-by to come to him if they wished to be photographed. Once in front of the backdrop, his subjects chose how to present themselves. Soldiers, farmers, city dwellers, mothers and sons, grandmothers and children stood side by side in stark black and white. He said the white background isolated people in the mind so that they became eternal, like the figures carved into the walls of Persepolis. He also ran a related series on the social types of Tehran. Because some sitters dressed as they would at home, without a headscarf or in Western clothes, he said the series was difficult to show inside Iran, and it was exhibited mostly abroad.
The Paris Review published a portfolio of the Iranian Family portraits in its Fall 2008 issue. Rastani was one of four artists chosen to represent Iran at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and his prints were included in Unedited History: Iran 1960-2014 at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at MAXXI in Rome. In January 2015 he travelled to Amsterdam for Opening Up, 9 Artists from Iran, at Francis Boeske Projects, telling NRC that governments do not bring people together, but through art they can come to know one another. In June 2026 the Sarajevo Memorial Center showed Standing to Remember: Sarajevo 1994-1996, sixty of his Bosnian photographs, curated by Lejla Hodzic as part of the WARM Festival.
In 2026 Rastani was treated for an advanced intestinal illness in a hospital in Furth, near Nuremberg in Germany, where his German wife cared for him. In July 2026 he said publicly that he was not well and wanted to go home. His daughter Rayeheh asked Iran's foreign minister for help obtaining a visa to reach him, and in the Iranian month of Mordad (July to August 2026) he returned to Iran, staying with his daughter in Babolsar and continuing treatment. Even while ill he visited a photography exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
He died at about 7:30 in the morning on Sunday 25 October 2026 (3 Aban 1405), according to the filmmaker Seyfollah Samadian, after what Iranian outlets described as a long period of illness. The photographer Masoud Zendehrooh Kermani, a friend, said they had spoken by phone the night before and that Rastani had been in pain. The Iranian Photographers Association expressed its condolences, and a farewell ceremony is to be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday 27 October 2026 in front of the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran.
Rastani once wrote, in words recalled by Jame Jam after his death, that he would live forever. In the portraits of the Iranian Family, as he said of the neighbours he photographed in Khorramshahr, someone lives in a photograph for always.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia; Mehr News; Khabar Online; ISNA via Shargh Daily; IQNA; Jame Jam Online; Akkasee; NRC (2015); The Paris Review (2008); WARM Festival.
In their own words
“The backdrop isolates people better in our minds, so they become eternal, like myths, carved images on the stone walls of Persepolis.”
On the white background of the Iranian Family portraits, The Paris Review, Fall 2008
“The first thing I did was look for a rifle so I could help defend the city. Until I realised that my camera was my weapon.”
On returning to Khorramshahr in 1982, NRC, 2015 (translated from Dutch)
“In a photograph, someone lives forever.”
On the portraits of Khorramshahr neighbours killed in the war, NRC, 2015 (translated from Dutch)
“Governments do not bring us together. But through art we can get to know each other. With my photographs I open the window to friendship.”
NRC, 2015 (translated from Dutch)
“The war affected our soul. Our family bond is the future. If it were lost, we would lose everything: our language, our culture, our respect.”
On the purpose of Iranian Family, NRC, 2015 (translated from Dutch)
“My role is only that of a historical reporter.”
On not taking sides in Iran's social divisions, speaking in Amsterdam, 2015 (translated from Persian)
“I am alive forever. As long as God exists, I am alive too.”
From one of his notes, quoted by Jame Jam Online, 25 October 2026 (translated from Persian)
Photos
1Mohsen Rastani
by People Forever
the Iranian Family series is on his website too, worth the time