Sham Trial in Iran for Canadian Photojournalist

Shahrzad Arshadi, a founder of the Kazemi Foundation, celebrates Ziba’s life and legacy and provides an update on her son Stephan Hachemi’s legal case against the Islamic Republic.

Zahra “Ziba” Kazemi was a passionate, mysterious and adventurous woman who started her career as a photographer in her forties. A woman who lived by her wits as a freelance photographer, she became the most famous photojournalist of 2003 after her death. She was an only child; she lost her biological father when she was a baby. Ezat Kazemi, her mother, married after a little while to Mr. Keramat, who Ziba loved as her real father. Ziba grew up in Shiraz and continued her education in Tehran cinema school and received her doctorate in arts and literature in Paris, the city she lived in from 1974 until her migration to Montreal in 1993 with her only child, Stephan.

The camera become a tool for Ziba, a tool through which she could express her concerns about what was happening around us. She travelled almost to all the troubled parts of the world: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, Haiti, Africa and Iran. Looking through her camera’s viewfinder and focusing on little but important details was her way. Her focus was on ordinary people. With a sincerity matched by her talent and guts, Ziba was able to catch people’s human nature by focusing into their eyes. With that she could connect us all together through images from different parts of this world.

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