AG Galerie, Tehran, Iran

In 2016, while clearing out his family home following his father’s death, Ali Mobasser discovered a box of damaged negatives. Contact prints revealed photos dating from 1959 to 1975. The photographer was Ali’s grandfather, a general of the Shah whose zest for life and love of photography encouraged him to capture intimate family moments of his family using his prized Rolleiflex. Ali Mobasser was not yet born, however, seeing his family during those happy times and their obliviousness of the pain that was to follow the 1979 Revolution deeply moved him: His grandmother, too ill to be taken abroad died of cancer, and the rest of his family fled Iran and would all die in exile. Ali Mobasser tells their tale by combining large-scale chronological contact prints with an enlarged, broken up, black and white photograph of his grandfather’s heart taken during an open-heart surgery in 1974. The Pieces of My Grandfather’s Broken Heart finally releases the love and the painful story of a family it has contained all these years.