Picturing a Dark Time

by Arni Haraldsson

http://www.canadianart.ca/articles/Articles_Details.cfm?Ref_num=441

Akbar Nazemi's "Unsent Dispatches from the Iranian Revolution, 1978–1979"

"My heart sank when Katrina informed me that the negatives were fading. It seems as if the images are gradually vanishing. I was speechless; these were not just images but a record of the history of my homeland." The words are the Vancouver-based photographer Akbar Nazemi's. They open For All Souls that are Not Counted, the introductory text that he wrote for last year's exhibition of his photographs, "Unsent Dispatches from the Iranian Revolution, 1978–1979," which appeared at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. They are one instance among many that prompt the thought that if the history of photography is plural, then one of its alternative histories could be comprised of such accounts of missing images. They would be narratives of when, for whatever reason, the latent images held on film failed to materialize or, having materialized, appeared altered or vanished altogether.

Perhaps the most famous of such narratives would be the account of Robert Capa's coverage of the Allied landings at Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. When his film was rushed to London's LIFE office, the story goes, an overzealous darkroom assistant turned up the heat in the drying cabinet to speed the images to press, cranking it so high that the film emulsion began to melt. Of the 106 frames that Capa shot, only 8 survived.

Or consider Nils Strindberg's documentation of the ill-fated 1897 Andrée Expedition across the frozen Arctic Ocean by air balloon. After setting off in the summer of that year from the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, the three-person expedition disappeared and was not seen again until 1930, when remains were found on remote White Island. Amid its members' belongings were several rolls of exposed but printable film. Fogged, spotted and light-struck, the photographs resemble nocturnal etchings. Their spectral effects bring to mind the vicissitudes that the team must have endured in the three-month ordeal to stay alive after the balloon was forced down onto the ice, 216 miles from land.

An even more extreme, if less lethal, example concerns two military officers, British ensigns Brandon and Dawson, who were commissioned in 1854 by the War Office to document the Crimean War. On their return voyage, the images that they had worked so hard to obtain began to gradually disappear before their eyes as a result of having been inadequately fixed. The pair arrived in London with stacks of undoubtedly beautiful but nonetheless worthless glass-plate monochromes.

Even a more accomplished photographer like Roger Fenton, who also travelled to the Crimea, was not immune to technical difficulties, which affected many of his glass-plate negatives. In Fenton's 1855 portrait of the war artist William Simpson, a mysterious force appears to be at work in the image, enveloping the sitter in a vaporous cloud of chemical blotches that wreak havoc on the surface of the image. These technical flaws come to life conveyed war more effectively than Victorian propriety could ever allow.

While faring better than these photographers, Akbar Nazemi has nevertheless experienced similar kinds of losses in his documentation of the 1978–9 Iranian Revolution. Nazemi, who was 26 at the time, took 4,300 photographs of the revolution, all of which survive, albeit with fading negatives, occasional water spots, colour shifts, smudges and scratches. Hours of 16-mm film footage, however, have since been lost, buried under rubble when his brother's former house was demolished in the early 1990s. On the surviving film, photographic grain is much in evidence, so much so that it reads as a motif of revolution on film. The graininess, dust and scratches, combined with the sometimes blurred action of his subjects, communicate an intense nervous energy.

In this respect, the animated, grain-peppered images resemble film stills and recall other documentations of revolution. Colour saturation notwithstanding, they are especially reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers. The director, once a photojournalist, used an internegative process that increases contrast, creating a deliberate graininess for his film. His "dictatorship of truth" demanded the look of a newsreel and non-professional actors as part of a sense of contingency that was "the DNA of the film." The Battle of Algiers foregoes one type of transparency for another. Instead of filming to achieve a flawless window-view onto the world, Pontecorvo emphasizes surface to locate the film as film within the world of the real. Thus, by way of mediation, Pontecorvo achieves a type of reverse transparency. The viewer is made to marvel over the very making, even existence, of the film.

Nazemi first heard word of the events taking place in Iran in 1978 when he was studying photography at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Excited and inspired, he packed up and returned to Tehran to document events. The revolutionaries initially perceived him as pro-Shah, an agent of the state. "Carrying a camera," he writes, "was a criminal act; taking pictures was considered an enemy activity. And after the Revolution [a period Nazemi has referred to as a 'dark time'] it was the same story." Three months went by before he gained the trust of the protestors. From then on, they allowed him to move freely among the crowds of the city. It is precisely this fluidity, this freedom of movement, that makes Nazemi's photographs unique.

Looking at and thinking about Nazemi's photographs, we are led to reflect on the historical moment and its passing. From the look of things, the faces and gestures of the people, we recognize a demarcation between then and now, East and West. The enlightened Western perception of the Iranian Revolution could be embodied by the figure of the intellectual Michel Foucault, who, in the fall of 1978, travelled to Tehran to bear witness. Seeing a society in transition would enable Foucault to further rid himself of what he deemed the often "senile short-sightedness" of European culture, and to exercise a "sharper eye." He was impressed by what he interpreted as the "absolutely collective will" of Iranian society, but apparently failed to see it as set in motion by the Khomeini regime. Foucault, in travelling to Tehran, was simultaneously travelling back to Paris and beyond, viewing the Iranian Revolution through the lenses of the French Revolution and the events of May 1968. The Iranian Revolution, for him, contradicted the Hegelian trajectory of progress toward modernity. Instead, it was a positive moment of discontinuity and a rejection of the West.

Today, we recognize claims for photographic objectivity as problematic. But what of the so-called democracy of the medium as expounded by André Bazin or Roland Barthes—the way, through indexicality, the photographic image allows for contingency, for the presence of the incidental and for the unconscious as recorded by mechanical vision? By way of the ebb and flow of the street as registered in Nazemi's photographs, a democracy of sorts is in evidence. Nazemi is no photojournalist, yet his images have the look of photojournalism. No doubt he sided with the revolutionaries, but, to his credit, Nazemi also shows the other side, the factions that included the pro-Shah contingent and the moderates.

Viewing "Unsent Dispatches," I am floored by the realization that the images have not seen the light of day since 1979. A quarter of a century later you can almost hear the rapturous crowds in Tehran chanting the slogans: "Sovereignty...Liberty...an Islamic Republic. We don't want the West…We don't want the North…We want an Islamic Republic.…" In front of Nazemi's photographs, we have only to squint our eyes to recognize that what initially appears as the euphoria of revolution already harbours the seeds of what would turn out to be more like a coup.

Despite gaps in the chronology—gaps that the 16-mm film footage would otherwise have filled—the range of subject matter is impressive. From students demonstrating at the University of Tehran in the autumn of 1978 to a throng of journalists awaiting Ayatollah Khomeini's arrival aboard an Air France 747 at Mehrabad Airport on February 1, 1979 (he would make his way by motorcade into the city, waving to the crowds from the back seat of a Chevy Blazer), Nazemi registers the sheer magnitude and force of the revolutionary collectivity. It culminates in one image, Demonstration: Two Million Participants, which depicts a single entity of coagulating form oozing out from under the Shahyad Tower (renamed Liberty Tower) and running down Enghelab Street (Revolution Street), the political and "spatial core" of the revolution.

Common to revolutions are toppled statues, and in one image a statue of the Shah has been transformed into a gasping, contorted torso clinging to a marble-clad plinth, foreshadowing the countless fallen Lenin statues after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Occasionally, Ayatollah Khomeini, flanked by advisers, makes an appearance, his regal presence among the crowds emanating a semblance of absolute authority. There is perhaps a hint of conspiracy in his reserved demeanour, enough to prompt a recollection of Freud's alleged aside to Jung upon their arrival in New York in 1909: "Little do they know that we are bringing them the plague." Numerous images of student demonstrators protesting in the streets amid burning, overturned vehicles recall the streets of Paris ten years earlier. In the background, behind the demonstrators and the barricades, one glimpses a city that is both Islamic and modern. Nazemi's project is as much a portrait of a city in transition as it is the documentation of a revolution. Visible everywhere are signs of Reza Shah's ambitious modernization initiatives, which made Tehran, for a period, a showcase for Western-style secular nationalism.

"Now the negatives fade," writes Nazemi, "as do the memories, mine as well as everyone else's. The Revolution is now old news." True. Yet Iran is still much in the news: as a part of George W. Bush's "axis of evil," in its quest for nuclear technology, with its pending application to join the World Trade Organization. There is also the tragic death in 2003 of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, imprisoned for taking photographs outside Evin prison in the north of Tehran. I cannot help but view Nazemi's images from the perspective of the present. Having been brought into the light, however altered by the passing of time, they appear to have come back to life. They live on.

Summer 2006