UCLA Anthropology Ph.D student Amy Malek’s photography exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum has just been reviewed in the LA Times.  The exhibition runs until August 22.

From the Fowler Museum news release:
From October 2009 through January 2010, four documentary photographers—Farhad Parsa, Arash Saedinia, Parisa Taghizadeh, and Ramin Talaie—focused their lenses on second-generation Iranian-Americans of Los Angeles, the world’s largest population of expatriate Iranians. Document: Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles—on view at the Fowler Museum from June 6–Aug. 22, 2010—offers a selection of images by each of these photographers which consider the everyday lives of their subjects. The exhibition also addresses the processes of documentation and how they relate to the photographers’ understandings of their own hyphenated Iranian identities.

The photographs capture the varied lives and interests of LA’s Iranian-American community—from toddlers at play to an acupuncturist in the office of her Los Feliz practice, from a young man break dancing to a young woman at prayer. There are also a few recognizable figures such as public intellectual Reza Aslan and comedian Maz Jobrani.

"In cultivating this collaborative project, I wanted to examine documentation as a representational process by offering four Iranian-American photographers' perspectives on who we are, stressing the importance of including multiple voices in documenting our own Los Angeles communities," says guest curator Amy Malek.

The photographs capture the varied lives and interests of LA’s Iranian-American community—from toddlers at play to an acupuncturist in the office of her Los Feliz practice, from a young man break dancing to a young woman at prayer. There are also a few recognizable figures such as public intellectual Reza Aslan and comedian Maz Jobrani.

"In cultivating this collaborative project, I wanted to examine documentation as a representational process by offering four Iranian-American photographers' perspectives on who we are, stressing the importance of including multiple voices in documenting our own Los Angeles communities," says guest curator Amy Malek.