The minimalism and the human condition by Mohammadreza Mirzaei

© Mohammadreza Mirzaei

Mohammadreza Mirzaei is a promising young Iranian photographer.

His photographs are minimalist and clean, men are reduced to minute black silhouette under a huge white sky, tiny pieces lost in a boundless green lawn. Definitively small, viewed from above or far away. Intent without end in the recitation of life, in those small facts of the daily theater of existence. Or again they are photographing tirelessly, each one ore some invisible monument. The remoteness, detachment, the size of these people united to the essentialness of photographs, make men, women and children photographed by Mohammadreza Mirzaei universal beings, general icons of the human kind.

Fabiano Busdraghi: How did you start taking pictures? What is your history as a photographer?

© Mohammadreza Mirzaei

Mohammadreza Mirzaei: Everything started from when I went to an art school, to study graphic design when I was 15 years old. I attend the first photography class in there with my father’s very old but lovely Zenith camera which I still have it. In fact in the first days, photography was only a way to discover the answers to my formalistic questions, but soon I realized this is what I want to do. What provoke my feelings. Surely my background in graphic design is still evident in my photographs.

Fabiano Busdraghi: What is the photography for you?

Mohammadreza Mirzaei: A good way to explore myself, and hopefully the world.

© Mohammadreza Mirzaei

Fabiano Busdraghi: Can you speak about your photo series called “Humans” ? What did you want to express and why?

Mohammadreza Mirzaei: “Humans” is devoted to the life, death, people and the relations between them and of course the loneliness. I was influenced by a poem by Bijan Jalali, the Iranian poet:

the living is impossible
but we are still here
with ambitions of everything
and we go
and we come.

In my mind the location in the Humans series is a kind of utopia, a non-descript town.. somewhere that nobody know where it is. A stage that becomes like a metaphor about the life, and the people are coming, staying for a while, talking, standing, sitting, playing… doing what they must do, and then leaving the stage.

© Mohammadreza Mirzaei

Fabiano Busdraghi: This means that the our ambitions do not make sense? Whether we run behind silly goals? That whole life is nothing more than a useless theatre?

Mohammadreza Mirzaei: No, I don’t agree with calling life a useless theatre. Actually I’m not talking about the qualities. The quality depends on individuals. It depends on us. Maybe the scenario of our lives. Maybe the role which has been given to us, these spacious stories doesn’t situate in my minimalism.

Fabiano Busdraghi: In the series Humans therefore there is a message or you only want to do a description of the human kind? Are you trying to tell people to give less importance to their everyday facts? Or you merely document what is the human condition?

Mohammadreza Mirzaei: I’m not interested to describe everything that’s going on and even if I were, what would happened to the viewer’s imagination? I’m only suggesting the circle of life, and everything more depends on viewers.

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