Ali & Ramyar

Ali & Ramyar are both graduated from Tehran University in Photography and got their master of Photography from Art University of Tehran. Their friendship started since 2000, while they started their academic studies in Tehran University, under the supervision of outstanding masters of art.
Ali Nadjian was born in 1976 in Tehran. Before starting photography, he has studied architecture which has been the origin profession of his entire family, but after years, his own interest brought him to photography.
Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh was born in 1980 in Sanandaj. In 2006 his series named “Father” won the 10^th Biannual Photography of Iran.

In 2006, Ali & Ramyar started their joint activities by opening the ACO Photo Studio. For three years they worked together on different projects.
Since 2009, and due to their mutual interest on working on the socio-political subjects, they decided to do their art activities as a duo. Inspired by the works of Jeff Wall, DiCorcia and Crewdson they chose stage photography as their medium and worked and researched on the life of middle class society in Iran.

Their first project named “We Live in Paradoxical Society” was broadly seen inside and outside the country. This project shows some paradoxes that people are faced with in their everyday life. Paradoxes which have differed the private life from the public after the 1979’s revolution.

“Ice” was their second project done in 2011. A project which describes the 2009’s presidential election and its happenings in different episodes.

Their third series of work was titled “Domino”. This series again is about the effect of political issues on life of people. After the Arab Spring, Iran was named in news media as the last country which might fall, and Domino is an illustration mixed of the experience artists had from Iran-Iraq war and what might have happened if it is going to be a war. An image of a reality touched and what might happen.

Ali & Ramyar did their last project, “Kathmandu”, in 2016. This series of photographs can be referred to Hijab, as a fundamental culture and paradox of the society. How people try to save their own lives’ privacy, while they carry the lust of sighting lives of the others. An obvious contradiction in an undetermined cycle.

During these years, Ali&Ramyar’s works have been shown in different galleries in Iran and abroad, which from between them some can be listed as:  Somerset house in London, The Military Museums of Calgary in Canada, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva. A selection of their works were also shown in Photoquai 2015 in Paris.