Maryam Firuzi from Iran is among the five photographers who won the Alfred Fried Peace Medal last week, the organizers announced.
She received the medal for her collection titled “Reading for Tehran Streets” at the Alfred Fried Photography Award in Vienna, Austria on September 20.
“Reading for Tehran Streets” is a collection of staged photographs depicting a woman (Firuzi) reading a book at various urban locations in Tehran.
Firuzi, who is also a filmmaker and a painter, told the Persian service of Honaronline on Thursday, “Photography fills the empty place of painting in my life and the times I’m not engaged in any film project.”
“This collection was gradually built up. I didn’t know, for example, how the ninth photo of the collection would turn out. I spent a year finding appropriate locations for my photos, and afterwards the story of each photo began to take shape, and each photo showed the path for the next.”
The woman featured in the photos is Firuzi herself. “The main subject of the collection reflects my concerns. Therefore, I saw it was necessary to play the role of the woman in my photos. Otherwise, I would have had to search for a woman to play the role, and I had no specific criteria for selecting the woman.”
Other winners of the Alfred Fried Peace Medal are Constanza Portnoy from Argentina for “Ángeles”, Anna Boyiazis from the USA for “Finding Freedom in the Water”, Selma van der Bijl from the Netherlands for “Lucky” and Nora Lorek from Sweden for “Milaya - Patterns of Home”.
Boyiazis also won the Alfred Fried Photography Award for best picture on the theme of peace, worth € 10000, for her work “Finding Freedom in the Water”.
“Pikin and Apollinaire” by Canadian photographer Jo-Anne McArthur won the Special Award of the Jury for the best single picture entry.
“Daydreaming” by Macedonian photographer Kaja Tasevska was selected as the Children’s Peace Image of the Year.
The Alfred Fried Photography Award is organized by UNESCO, the Austrian Parliament, the Austrian Parliamentary Reporting Association, the International Press Institute (IPI) and the German Youth Photography Award, with the support of World Press Photo. The award “aims to present human efforts to live together in peace and the quest for beauty and goodness in our lives,” the organizers have said.
It has been named after Alfred Hermann Fried (1864-1921), an Austrian pacifist and author who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911.
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