Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was born on 22 June 1940 in Tehran, Iran. He won a painting competition at 18 and went on to study at the University of Tehran's Faculty of Fine Arts, majoring in painting and graphic design and working as a traffic policeman to support his studies. He completed his degree with a bachelor's examination in 1968.

Kiarostami began his career designing title sequences and working in advertising before joining Kanun, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he helped establish a filmmaking department and directed his early shorts and features. His international reputation grew through the "Koker trilogy," Where Is the Friend's House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, and reached a peak with Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997. He continued to direct into the 2000s, including The Wind Will Carry Us and Ten, while increasingly turning to still photography, producing series such as Snow White, Trees and Snow, Rain, and Forest Without Leaves that were later exhibited at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Kiarostami died on 4 July 2016 in Paris, France, at the age of 76, following treatment for gastrointestinal cancer, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, RFE/RL, and multiple other major outlets. Since his death, his archive and exhibition loans have been managed through the Kiarostami Foundation in cooperation with his family.

Kiarostami is widely regarded by critics and festivals as one of the defining directors of late twentieth century world cinema, an assessment built over more than two decades of major honors: the Prix Roberto Rossellini at Cannes in 1992, the Palme d'Or in 1997, the Silver Lion at Venice in 1999, the Akira Kurosawa Award in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale in 2004. His late-career photography drew separate but related recognition, with the Museum of Modern Art mounting the 2007 exhibition Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker to present his films, photographs, and video installations together, and the Victoria and Albert Museum later presenting his Trees in Snow and Forest Without Leaves photographs. Institutions have continued to revisit his work since his death, including a 2022 to 2023 survey at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art organized with the Kiarostami Foundation and a 2025 exhibition at the National Gallery of Armenia drawn from work he donated to the Golden Apricot International Film Festival.

Kiarostami's auction footprint is centered on his photographic prints rather than his films, and it is small relative to his cultural stature. The highest price documented for his work is USD 133,000, paid for Untitled #6 from the Snow White series at Christie's Dubai on 19 April 2008, a sale reported at the time to have made him the most expensive photographer in the region. Subsequent sales of Snow White prints at Tehran Auction, held in the years after his death, have realized considerably lower results, generally in the range of USD 56,000 to 60,000. The pattern suggests a market that is active mainly in the Middle East, driven by a small number of print editions, rather than a broad international secondary market.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Kiarostami's photographic output, and authentication and loan matters run through the Kiarostami Foundation and his family rather than through a commercial estate program or a single representing gallery. His auction record is real but limited to a small number of print sales, concentrated around the Snow White series and centered on Tehran and Dubai auction houses, so any single result should be read against a thin sales history rather than a deep market. His museum presence, spanning MoMA, the V&A, Centre Pompidou, LACMA, and the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, is the stronger and more consistent signal of institutional standing than the auction data alone.