In the summer of 1978, Manoocher Deghati, educated as a filmmaker, returned to Iran after three years of studies at the Rome school of cinema just as the first major demonstrations against the regime of the Shah were breaking out.
Manoocher photographed all the big events of the new regime of Khomeini, the hostage crisis at the American embassy and the Iran-Iraq war, which he covered for six years.
In order to be able to go to the front independently of 'tours' organized expressly for foreign journalists, one had to agree not to send any photos abroad...As for me, I wanted to break down censorship and barriers, to show really what the battlefields looked like before they had been tidied up for official pictures.
[citation needed]In 1983, Manoocher Deghati received the "World Press" first prize in the news category for the photos included here of the Iran-Iraq War.
From 1995, based in Jerusalem for AFP, he concentrated on this question, With his brother Reza, he co-founded Webistan Photo Agency [1] which has been distributing their own images but also those of several other photographers since 1991.
He used this time to interview and report on the veterans of all the French wars of this century, from the “poilus” of 1914-18 to the UN blue helmets wounded in ex-Yugoslavia.
When he recovered from wounds, he went to Afghanistan in 2002 to found Aina Photo [2] which has become the first and most important[citation needed] supplier of photographs from that country.
[citation needed] Currently Manoocher Deghati is Middle East Regional Photo Editor for the Associated Press, based in Cairo, Egypt.