In 1956, Morath made two trips to the Middle East for Holiday Magazine, one of Magnum’s most important clients. The assignment was a notable professional achievement for Morath, as it was among the earliest to take her outside Europe (she had traveled to South Africa in 1955, and would also go to the US and Mexico in ‘56). During March and April of that year she traveled to Iran, the partial fulfillment of her long-held dream to travel the Silk Road from Europe, through Persia, to China. As Ritchin and Naggar note: "During March and April of 1955, Morath made a five-week journey to Iran with the publisher Robert Delpire to work on her second monograph. Holiday had also asked her to photograph the carpets and mosques of Isfahan, and she had assignments for the Pepsi-Cola Corporation in Tehran and for Standard Oil in Abadan... However most of the images Morath shot for De La Perse a l'Iram (From Persia to Iran) were self-assigned. Carrying two cameras she made more than 5,000 exposures: one hundred rolls of black-and-white and about forty rolls of colour film. She also carried a Polaroid camera, and gave the portraits she took to her nomad subjects, who had probably never been photographed before. Beneath it's jacketed cover featuring a full-bleed detail of a colour photograph of Iranian carpets, with the title set like a fax in the corner, De La Perse a l'Iran is printed on off-white paper and is divided into eleven thematic chapters mixing black-and-white and colour photographs, with captions at the end of each chapter and a historic text by Edouard Sablier. Though Morath had not planned it that way, colour photographs are predominant in the book because a light leak damaged the black-and-white film in one of her cameras, which she discovered only upon her return to Paris. Morath's graceful and empathetic photographs capture beautiful archaeological sites in Persepolis but mostly focus on the great variety of human subjects she was able to approach: a Kurdish shepherd in the plain, steet musicians, a boy carrying a tower of suitcases in the bazaar, Empress Soraya in her palace, small girls knotting carpets... Attracted particularly to women and children, she often makes ironic, bitter-sweet social commentaries on their situation: pairing veiled women with caged cockatoos in the Shiraz market, for instance, or contrasting the tiny stature of girls weaving carpets with the gigantic size of the looms, a statement on child labour. De le Perse a l'Iran lies somewhere between anthropology and diary. It does not express decisive moments but, rather, the complex layering of history and modernity within a culture in transition: 'What interests me', Morath wrote, 'is the continuity - or lack of it - between past and present. This is what is expressed in the title of my book From Persia to Iran.'" Included in Fred Ritchin and Carole Naggar, Magnum Photobook, The Catalogue Raisonne, p.35 Condition: Very good first edition from 1958. Dents to both corners - affects cover and pages. Small damage to top of spine. Previous owner's name to first blank page. Tear in dust jacket. Please examine listing photographs carefully.