The Estate of a Movement, the Pictures that Remained

I have not seen Iranian photography this ignored in a long time.

The results of the World Press Photo competition were announced a full week ago and three of the selected photographs were taken in Tehran of events following the elections of Khordad 1388 (June 2009). One of the winners was from Italy, the other from France, but the third person, who remains unidentified, is none other than the person who took the picture of Neda Agha Soltan that sent tremors down the back of the news world. It was a picture that forced the leaders of Iranian to lie ridiculously that the British government was involved in Neda’s murder.

The World Press Photo best image of 2009 by Pietro Masturzo, a freelance Italian photographer, is of the type rarely seen. It portrays in the best way imaginable the post-election situation in Iran: the atmosphere full of terror, people have to stay at home to protest, and photographers secretly take pictures from the rooftops for fear of being arrested.

Although it has been about a week since this photo was announced a winner, I have yet to find any reportage of it in the official and semi-official news sites within the country as if this news has yet to reach Iran. However, whether the government of Iran likes it or not, this photo is the winner in one of the world’s most renowned photo competitions.

This time, in the selection of the year’s best photos in the civil protest category (1) the photographers were Iranians who won all the awards. But again, nothing about this was published on IRNA’s site or Fars’, or even in domestic photography-specific sites, while news coverage of photography exhibitions in the capital were directed to solo exhibitions and primarily non-social documentary photographers. It seems that the whole world of photography has focused its lenses on pictures whose photographers cannot even smile in satisfaction at their successes, and fear and despair has forced them to remain silent.

It cannot be avowed that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance under Ahmadinejad’s administration is unaware of the foundation of World Press Photo. Although it was stopped after two programs, it was not long ago that Ahmadinejad himself, in the ninth administration, issued a permit to this foundation for the establishment of workshops in Tehran.

An investigation of domestic newspaper and reportage archives from previous years shows that the results of such competitions were considered important, however, for publications under government control, expediency of the regime illustrates which stories people should be aware of and which not.

The saddest part of the story of that time reveals itself in that not even the names of the photographers are mentioned on the Pictures of the Year Competition website <http://www.poyi.org/>. This is primarily for their own safety, but this time the photographers might have really not wanted to be revealed.

The winning photographers cannot even celebrate when they are accused of espionage because of their news, their colleagues are still in prison or are in exile in other countries so as to protect themselves from the government.

The Islamic Republic saw the loss of their power and legitimacy through the work of these photographers and set about restricting the media. By creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation and implementing unprecedented levels of censorship, security forces have rendered professional activity for the creators of these pieces impossible. A look at the departure of foreign journalists based in Iran in the months following the election shows that the government has continued to place numerous restrictions on their activities in an effort to present only its official views.

In order to maintain working offices in Iran and avoid coming into conflict with the Iranian government, some international news agencies prefer to cover stories from a third country. In the last eight months the famous sentence accompanying all the photos of Iran published by international news agencies stands out telling of the block on the international media’s access to news sources and the use of photos from unknown photographers. The fact that the photographer of the above-mentioned photo is unknown illustrates the extent to which fear and intimidation dominate the atmosphere of the Iranian photography community.

With reference to all that has been said, we realize the power of pictures in the age of technology and at present, and understand Iran’s post-election unrest in the value of images posted by people on news and social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook, at a time when the all newspapers had been cut off from the outside world by the government.

Though the regime has published images of people on websites connected to security centers in their standoff with dissidents in an effort to identify them, and in so doing has rendered the use of photos not unique to the dissidents and the Islamic Republic has also gained from the greater intimidation inflicted by this medium. A few days after the elections 22 Khordad, 1388 (June 12, 2009) would be enough for the government to still be searching for pictures eight months later. In a way, photos have become the Achilles heel of the government of the Islamic Republic.  

This time, however, it is the winning photographs and the millions of other frames taken by photographers and others that over the years will remind the people of the world what an extreme price Iranians paid to reach democracy.