Monday, December 04, 2006

The Power of Photography !

This past Saturday, on my way back from the barbershop, I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio). I always like to listen to NPR especially to the Weekend Edition. The program this time was far more interesting than I could imagine. After more than 20 year, an anonymous photographer of an execution photo, which had won the Pulitzer Prize, has been found by a Wall Street Journal reporter.

What made it more important for me was the birthplace of the photo that goes back to Iran. It is of the execution of 9 Kurds in Sanandaj in 1979, one year after revolution. I hardly could wait to see the real photo. After I got home I went to the NPR website and it was there; a black and white photograph, so powerful, so sad and so touching. It tells the story of 9 men being executed in the mist of a newborn revolution with the presence of no jury no attorney, only with one Judge/Prosecutor in a 5-minute trial. It was not the first nor the last time that this kind of execution took place in Iran but it was the first time that a reporter along with a photographer were present and the story was covered in the media. After the photo was published in the first page of Ettelaat, an Iranian afternoon newspaper, it made world news and became the picture of the Islamic Revolution. It mainly was because of this photo that newspaper censorship began in Iran of after the revolution. You can hear the story of this photo and its not-anymore-anonymous photographer from Josh Prager the Wall Street Journal reporter, who spent 4 years in order to discover the photographer and the story of these men.



Photographer: Jahangir Razmi
A government firing squad executes nine Kurdish rebels
and two former police officers of the deposed Shah of Iran
after summary trials, Aug. 27, 1979.
The next day, another 21 Kurdish rebelsand military deserters were executed.


Other photos of the same day by the same photographer are here.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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