News: A web site for Morteza Momayez
January 9, 2006, received from Anooshiravan Momayez

Morteza Momayez's son Anoosh recently wrote me that there is now an official web site for his late father: www.momayez.ir Below are five posters from the web page for a series "Us Iranians after three thousand years", designed by Momayez in 2002.

I would like to use this occasion to tell a small personal anecdote about the great iranian graphic design master who died a few months ago: I had often noticed, at parties for example, that people who knew him well approached him, asked him a question, obviously to get some advice, listened intently and disappeared again after a while to make room for the next person:

Morteza Momayez with Majid Abbasi	with Bijan Sayfoury	with Laurence Madrelle
with Melk Imboden	with Martha Granados	with his wife Afsaneh
with Sacha Happee and ?	with Guy Schockaert	with Megi Zumstein

As I knew that he was friendly and easy to talk to, I decided to also try my luck when I met him in Tehran in 2004. I had a trivial question, although it had bothered me for a long time with increasing intensity, and I had asked it professional photographers, graphic design teachers, friends and experts, and never received a satisfactory answer: I take a lot of digital photos, sometimes just to make sure that at least one of them is good, and then I wind up with so many that are almost identical, and can not decide which is the best and do not have the heart to throw away the rest, in case I change my mind tomorrow, or next year. What should I do? Morteza's advice was simple, clear, and more profound and far reaching than I realized at the moment: Make your choice carefully, and keep only the best picture. You must realize that throwing away scetches and rejecting preliminary designs is part of the creative process, don't be afraid to do it, you will not lose anything as their imperfection has already contributed to the perfection of the final choice. I was, and still am, greatly relieved, and appreciate the logic of Morteza's argument. Nevertheless, I do not strictly follow his advice, the infinte storage capacity of a cheap and empty 300 Gbyte hard disk is just "temptation beyond endurance", but my worries about the problem are gone. Also, housecleaning has become much easier since then. The conversation took place under a sanskrit calligraphy (part of which is visible in the background of the picture with Melk Imboden above), and maybe Morteza Momayez's advice reflects the indian philosophy which puts creation, preservation and destruction, represented by the gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, on the same level. "Death is part of Life" is yet another version of the same idea, that often went through my head since last November. Quite unexpectedly, the New Year's greeting from Thierry Sarfis, where he shows a world map made up of quotes from different countries, echoes these beliefs: The quote for Poland, attributed to the great poet Adam Mickiewicz reads "For a worthy cause, the act of destruction is as sacred as the act of creation".