Farhad VakiliTabar’s Double Exposures Take a Second Look at Iran, Colorado

You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we take a look at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town.

Farhad VakiliTabar was born in Iran and moved to Houston when he was nineteen to study engineering and meteorology. “I came here for school, went back to Iran and then realized I wanted to be in America,” says VakiliTabar. “If I was in Iran, I would have had to go to war and fight for a regime I didn’t really believe in.”

So instead, he relocated in Denver soon after he visited a friend in the Rockies and realized “how nice it is here,” he says. “There was a calling for me to find another place, and then I saw the mountains.” He soon found another area of study, too, taking photography classes at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Community College of Denver.


He landed a job at University of Colorado Denver's library, where he met his future wife, who's originally from France. “My wife and I had a son, and then we adopted a girl from China,” VakiliTabar says. “As a result we have four nationalities in our household, and that gave me a unique and multicultural perspective that appears in my work.”

For over fifteen years VakiliTabar has focused on double exposures, which are currently featured in a show at Kaladi Brothers Coffee. The pieces are “inspired by the memory of a moment,” he says, and play with reality. “I’m trying to create a sense of wonder,” he adds.

VakiliTabar has captured images in China, France, Spain, France, the Caribbean Islands and Colorado, of course. He also has a series that shows "aspects of Iran that maybe we don’t hear about and talk about,” he says. “It’s a historic country with a lot of culture and art. There are people there, and kids, and I thought I’d share some aspect on that. Iran has a very young population — a lot of it educated and pro-Western.”


VakiliTabar's photography has been featured in juried shows and at galleries around Denver, including Alliance Française Gallery, SPACE gallery, CHAC Gallery & Cultural Center, Spark Gallery, Core New Art Space and Reed Photo Art (now John Fielder’s Colorado). VakiliTabar also placed third in a National Geographic competition. In addition to fine art, he does portraits – including senior pictures – and wedding photography. For more information, visit VakiliTabar's website or check out his Facebook page.