Al Kamalizad photography






Rebuilding Babel


My family emigrated from Iran when I was three years old. That made me young enough to easily assimilate into American culture. The same cannot be said about my parents or older brother. Over thirty years later, my parents still have an accent and struggle to communicate in English.

Yet even though the bulk of my cultural connections are American, I know there is Iranian culture floating around inside me – culture that is usually easy to ignore while walking through an American life.

I have begun to use photography to systematically share my Iranian past and present with my American friends. These images are from a work-in-progress series of portraits of friends posing with artifacts and mementos of my familial culture.  

(7 slides)

non-photography work: here