About the Author

Newsha Tavakolian (born 1981 in Tehran, Iran). A self-taught photographer, Newsha began working professionally in the Iranian press at the age of 16 at a women's daily newspaper called Zan. At the age of 18, she was the youngest photographer to cover the 1999 student uprising, which was a turning point for the country's blossoming reformist movement and for Newsha personally as a photojournalist; a year later she joined the New York based agency Polaris Images. In 2002 she started working internationally, covering the war in Iraq for several months. She has since covered regional conflicts and natural disasters and has made social documentaries in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen. Her work is published in international magazines and newspapers such as Time Magazine, Newsweek, Stern, Le Figaro, Colors, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, NRC Handelsblad and The New York Times Magazine. . Her work has been exhibited internationally at such museums as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Boston's Museum of Fine Art as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum in London.

Anahita Ghabaian is the director and owner of Silk Road Gallery in Tehran. She is specialized in photography and she works as an independent curator at Silk Road Gallery, which she established in 2001. She is well known for her work with Iranian photography and she has curated various exhibitions internationally. In 2009 she was the Artistic Director of Photoquai - the biennial of the images of the world - for the Quai Branly museum, Paris. In 2011 she published Iranian photography, a contemporary look at art in Iran.