Bahman Jalali originally studied economics and political science at Melli University in Tehran but later trained as a photographer at the Royal Photographic Society in London.
In 1972 he started working as a photographer for Tamasha magazine alongside teaching in various Iranian universities. He also worked as a documentary photographer travelling all across Iran, a vocation that culminated in his work on the Iran–Iraq war, published in several books. He was, in collaboration with his wife Rana Javadi one of the curators of Iran’s fist museum of photography, Akskhaneh, and later a founding member of the photography magazine, Aksnameh. His photographs are in the collection of many museums. His long distinguished career was recognized with a major retrospective at the Antoni Tapies Foundation in Barcelona in 2007. The Niedersachsen Foundation in Hanover posthumously granted him the international Spectrum Photography Prize of 2011.
