TEHRAN – Cartoonist Kambiz Derambakhsh opened his first exhibition of photos during a ceremony at Tehran’s Silk Road Gallery of on Friday.

“I wanted to paint with my camera and so I did it,” Derambakhsh said during the ceremony.

“Photography was always interesting for me and I wanted to experience it someday. I have always been unhappy over why photography has not been recognized as an art in the country and people prefer paintings rather than photos, even though a photo could be a very good artistic work,” the 73-year-old artist told the Persian service of ISNA on Friday.

“I had been living and creating drawings since my childhood. The appearance of ideas and thoughts on photographic negatives is not such an unusual feature, but this is the first time I have taken photos,” he added.

Entitled “Please Smile”, the exhibition opened with a large number of visitors including filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, writer and poet Javad Mojabi and cartoonist Bozorgmehr Hosseinpur.

“I purchased a small digital camera last Noruz and took most of the photos within the first three months that I had the camera. I took about 250 photos, some of them feature the trip I made to Paris. I took about 200 photos in less than an hour in a public market in Paris,” Derambaksh explained.

“The photos opened a new window on the world to me so I decided to take more photos and I began to work on Qajar-era works on my desk with a desk lamp, and only for about two hours. Some of these are on show here.

“The Qajar-era photos are really beautiful but are not easily accessible, so I tried to create new forms using the photos so that they seem to have been taken only yesterday,” He explained.

“I am happy the photos are good but the exhibition of my photos will not end here. In my small camera there are enough photos for at least five more exhibits. I want to continue since they are my love and life,” he concluded.

The exhibition, which also contains some of his cartoons and a collection of his photo-paintings, will run until October 4 at the gallery located at 210 Keshavarz Blvd.

Photo: Cartoonist Kambiz Derambakhsh attends the opening ceremony of his first exhibition of photos at Tehran’s Silk Road Gallery of on September 18, 2015. (Honaronline/Farzan Qasemi)

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