Ali & Ramyar

Ali Nadjian (born 1976, Tehran) and Ramyar Manouchehrzadeh (born 1980, Sanandaj) met in 2000 as photography students at the University of Tehran, and both went on to earn a master’s degree in photography from the Art University of Tehran. In 2006 they opened the ACO Photo Studio together, and since 2009 they have worked as an artistic duo. Through staged photography, they look at the life of Iran’s urban middle class and the split between private and public life. Their series include We Live in a Paradoxical Society (2010), Ice (2011), on the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election, Domino (2013), which draws on memories of the Iran–Iraq war, Kathmandu (2016), on the hijab and the curtain as the line between seeing and being seen, and Demo (2017), on the crowd in Iran’s contemporary history. We Live in a Paradoxical Society, Domino and Kathmandu were shown at Silk Road Gallery. Their work has also been exhibited at Photoquai in Paris (2009), in Burnt Generation at Somerset House in London (2014), The Military Museums in Calgary (2015) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (2016), and at Photo Gaspésie in Canada (2021).