Iran 1970

Before he became the defining photographer of Europe's post-industrial landscapes, a young Gabriele Basilico, not yet twenty-six, set out from Milan toward Kabul in a Fiat 124, and the pictures he brought back from a trip that stalled in Iran already show the eye that would define his career.

In summer 1970, Basilico and a small group of friends drove the overland hippie route through Yugoslavia and Turkey, planning to sell a photo reportage to a magazine along the way. The car went off the road near Tehran the journey continued anyway, south to Qom and Shiraz, on to Persepolis during preparations for the 2,500th-anniversary celebrations of the Persian monarchy, then to Isfahan and back to Tehran. The negatives sat in Basilico's archive for over forty years before Humboldt Books published them in its Time Travel series, with an introduction by Luca Doninelli and an afterword by Giovanna Calvenzi, his travelling companion. The volume is 80 pages, softcover with French flaps and an inserted booklet, bilingual in Italian and English.

Basilico would go on to photograph the industrial edges of Milan, Beirut's war-scarred skyline, and cities worldwide with a detached, architectural rigor. Iran 1970 shows him before that vocabulary formed: what the publisher calls "Basilico pre-Basilico."