Bearded demonstrators in the streets of Tehran. The veiled stares of huddled women. Smashed up streets and statues. parades of faceless men brandishing enormous posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And what is becoming the iconic image of contemporary Iranian history: the young man holding up his blood-soaked hands, or hands soaked in something designed to look bloody.
I thought I was leafing through a new book on the June demonstrations in Iran. But I wasn't. 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World, by photographer David Burnett (National Geographic Books), is a visual documentary of the "untidy thing," in the words of John Kifner (the senior New York Times correspondent), that was the first Iranian Revolution 30 years ago. Kifner wrote the introduction to the book, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who is Iranian, the Foreword. ("I remember sitting with my parents and sisters on our porch, listening to the sounds from the nearby mosque at prayer time. Ayatollah Khomeini's voice, on secretly smuggled audio-tapes, rang low and determined through our neighborhood.")
Except for the pictures of the shah with Richard Nixon and, among American men, those slightly bouffant hairdos and pyramid-sized collars they favored at the time, the book feels like a changeless time warp. In the Iranian photographs, hardly anything has changed, though of course more than half the Iranian population today wasn't alive back then. The similarities between the Iranian and Soviet revolutions are becoming more apparent: how time stopped in both cultures, how repression replaced the chaos of progress as the reigning dynamic, how antagonism to the outside world, for lack of a more sustainable ideology, defined each revolution's arrested personality.
Many of Burnett's photographs (his work has been published in Life and Time, and he's a co-founder of Contact Press Images) capture those early-forming realities in glimmers that, in retrospect, look inevitable. Take his description of an image he shot of a Khomeini news conference on Feb. 2, 1979, the photographer in him conveying unique insights:
The press conference is held in a big room at the Refah School. Khomeini arrives with a small coterie and takes a seat on the stage, looking as if this is the last place he wants to be. On the stage with him are his advisers, Ebrahim Yazdi and Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. The ayatollah appears completely uninterested in the event.
Questions flow from the press, and answers, carefully translated into English, follow. There is a similar attitude among all speakers while they await the translation. They become bored, and their thoughts seem to turn to other things. Watching Khomeini with my 280mm lens, (a 200 with a 1.4x extender), the arced lights create strong shadows over his face as his piercing eyes scan the room like tiny lasers.
Outside of course, blood was flowing. Not unlike more recent news conferences featuring the bored and haughty Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the more imperious speeches of Khomeini's successor, the supreme leader known as Ayatollah Khamenei, who'd indulge audiences with soporific words while their vigilantes bashed heads outside.
The book just arrived in the mail. I'll have a fuller review in the days ahead.
See Also:
- Iranian Politics: Complete Guide
- Can Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution Survive?
- Profile: Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader
- June 3 1989: Death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
- Profile: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- How Nixon's Soviet Union Policy Informs Obama's Iran Policy
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