Ahmad Nateghi

Ahmad Nateghi (Persian: احمد ناطقی; born 1958) is an Iranian photographer who is best known for his photos of the Iran–Iraq War.

Life

He was born in 1958 in the south of Tehran. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran in the field of directing. He started photography in the 1970s as a teenager, and in the years 1978 to 1980, during the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, he photographed several big events as an amateur. He started professional photography when the Islamic Republic took power, and became the head of the photo department of the Islamic Republic News Agency in 1983, and during the Iran-Iraq war, he recorded many famous photographs. His unique photos of the Halabja massacre made him famous. He took the infamous photo of Omar Khawar. His last street exhibition was held 21 years after the Halabja tragedy in 2009 in the same places where the incident happened, which he was welcomed and surprised by the people of Halabja. After holding the exhibition in Halabja, Ahmad Nateghi was searching for the living people of his pictures for two years and he found 7 of them in his most famous pictures, and after talking to them, he prepared pictures of them and a collection of other Halabja massacre pictures along and made it into a collection titled "The Sound of Silence" in Persian, Kurdish and English.