A photo-book on Iran made by Iranian photographers using their smartphones, telling the story of Iran today in a way you have never seen before.

PREMISE

14&15 Mobile Photographers is a web platform launched in 2015 by Giorgio Cosulich de Pecine and Giulio Napolitano. We have worked as photo-journalists for over twenty years for the United Nations, Getty Images, Agence France Presse, Nike, Qantas, Alitalia, Newsweek, Time, Stern, NY Times, Vanity Fair, and others.

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Increasingly, we have become critical of the photography market, which has taken over the art and transformed it into a limited set of rules dictated by the laws of the market on how to show the world around us. In order to get noticed today, a photographer must follow those rules and show, for example, the suffering of others. We don’t believe in this. We believe that photography is inside you.

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We wanted to get out of this big marketplace of suffering and tell a different story in a new way, and decided to venture into mobile photography – a territory not yet conquered by the market. Since day one, we have been overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of material we received.

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PROJECT Through the platform we learned that mobile photography can open the door to places we don’t really know. Iran for example. Hundreds of Iranian photographers sent us their work, reflecting an Iran that we never see in the media.

This is the Iran we want to show in our book. Iran seen by Iranians, narrated through their photographic talent. So, we launched a hashtag, #1415IRAN, and collected over 16,000 images of more than 300 Instagrammers, providing eye-witness accounts of life in Iran, of tastes, habits, entertainment, work, traditions, healthcare, women, family, religion, street life. Even when the deadline closed after six months, in August 2016, new images kept coming in, showing the productivity of Iranian mobile photographers and their desire to establish relations with the outside world.

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The publication of a book involves a drastic selection of images, reducing the total number to between 60 and 80 photographs. To prevent such a mass of precious material to be lost, we want to open a website showing the imagery produced daily in Iran. But that is the second step. At the moment we are concentrating on the book to preserve at least part of this visual wealth and contribute to a better understanding of Iran.

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More info about 14&15 Mobile Photographers and #1415IRAN on:

www.1415mobilephotographers.com

Instagram: @1415iran

Instagram: @1415mobilephotographers

Instagram: @1415bestoftheweek