Gottingen: Steidl, 2009. Large very heavy hardcover with dustjacket. 250 x 320 mm. 336 pages, with 320 tritone plates. Edited by John P. Jacob. Essays by Robert Delpire, Monika Faber and Azar Nafisi. Text in English. Light edgewear else a clean and very good copy

First edition, English version

“In 1956, Inge Morath traveled to the Middle East for Holiday magazine where she wore the traditional chador and traveled alone most of the time. “It was difficult to photograph there as a woman,” she later wrote. Moraths subjects range from politics to religion and from work to commerce; from the Shah s palace to the nomad s tent to the Zoroaster s sacred shrine. “Her eye is most attracted by people, details, the minutiae of living,” Courtland Canby wrote for the New York Times in June of 1960. Morath entered deeply into the culture of the places she visited and the lives of the people she photographed in order to document, as she noted, “the continuity – or lack of it – between past and present.” She photographed Iran with the fine vision of an anthropologist, examining religious rituals, costuming, work, sport, music, art, and theatre. Morath s work in Iran presaged her later work in Spain, China, and Russia, creating an extensive document of the clash between modernity and tradition in the post-war world. Retrospectively, Inge Morath: Iran recalls a land and a culture that has been profoundly transformed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is a window into the past which provides a unique perspective on Iran in the present

Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, she wrote articles to accompany his photographs and was invited to Paris with Haas by Robert Capa to join the just-founded Magnum agency as an editor. She began photographing in London in 1951, and after assisting Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher for two years and working independently throughout that time, became a member of the agency in 1955. Throughout her life, Morath was a prolific diarist and letter writer, and in her extensive travels in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, China and the USSR, she kept copious written entries along with her many photographs. She married Arthur Miller in 1962 and settled in New York and Connecticut, though she continued to travel and publish photographic essays, pursuing both assignments and independent projects until her death in 2002. She has won numerous awards, including being presented with a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Connecticut, the Austrian State Prize for Photography, the Gold medal of the National Art Club, and the Medal of Honor in Gold of the City of Vienna”