Iranian photojournalist wins award for picture of Kurdish couple

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — An Iranian photojournalist this week won an Austrian award for an image showing the love story between a Kurdish man with special needs and his wife. 

Sasan Moayyedi, 62, is from Tehran and has worked as a photojournalist for 38 years. He gained fame as one of the first journalists to document the chemical attack against Kurds in Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1988.

This week, one of Moayyedi’s images in his album Love Story received the Global Peace Photo Award’s world-best picture on the theme of peace, accompanied by a €10,000 prize.

The award ceremony was held in Vienna on Monday and the Austrian Embassy in Iran collected Moayyedi’s prize on his behalf. The photojournalist said in an Instagram post that he could not attend the event as he is not vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Love Story features the life of Salah Saeedpour, a Kurd from Mariwan city in western Iran. When he was 15 in 2001, he went on a picnic with his family but stepped on a landmine planted during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. He lost both hands and eyes. Despite the disability, Saeedpour remained active, even winning medals in swimming. His marriage to a young Kurdish woman, Sarveh Amini, in 2014 changed his life. 

Moayyedi has followed the couple since 2014, taking their photographs of their daily life.

Moayyedi has been documenting Kurds for a decade. In 2014, he visited the Kurdish city of Kobane in Syria to document the devastation caused by war with the Islamic State group (ISIS).