Aiming the lens at 'Iran's darkest corners'.

Byline: Olivia Snaije

Summary: The Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan once described his youth like this:"My childhood was spent among the wheatfields outside Tehran. My father built a solitary house, far away from the nearest neighbor. I was on my own. Life was the blue sky and the sound of crickets. Then came a television set, and with it, the rest of the world."

LONDON: The Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan once described his youth like this:"My childhood was spent among the wheatfields outside Tehran. My father built a solitary house, far away from the nearest neighbor. I was on my own. Life was the blue sky and the sound of crickets. Then came a television set, and with it, the rest of the world."

Golestan went on to chronicle his part of the world for more than 25 years until he was tragically killed on assignment after stepping on a land mine in Iraqi Kurdistan in April 2003. He died the way he lived, in the midst of one of many wars, intent on being an eyewitness for the rest of the world.

A retrospective of Golestan's work opened this month at the London School of Economics' (LSE) Atrium Gallery. Curated by his wife, Hengameh, also a photographer, the black and white photographs in the exhibit "Recording the Truth in Iran" span the period from the early rumblings of the Iranian Revolution in 1978 to the mid-1980s, and include images documenting the Kurdish uprising in Iran and the Iran-Iraq war.

Golestan grew up in Iran in a family deeply involved in politics. His father was a filmmaker who had fled the shah's secret police and sought asylum in Britain, while his mother, a ceramicist, remained in Iran. After a brief stint at boarding school in England, Golestan returned to Tehran where he worked on one of his father's films and dabbled in painting and music, before finally picking up a camera. Golestan was self-taught but his ability to spot the essential quickly got him work at press agencies and magazines. He soon began covering the first days of the Iranian Revolution.

The selection of photographs from the revolution's early days capture the emotional intensity of the moment experienced by people in the street who were caught up in the tumult that ultimately led to Iran's becoming an Islamic Republic. In an interview with Mohsen Moshefi and Hamid Qazvini, who authored a book about him, Golestan said about those early days that it was the first time he heard ordinary people speak of martyrdom.

In one of the photographs taken in 1979, students hold up the bloodied coat of one of their martyred peers, while in another, a student mourns a friend shot outside the University of Tehran - all that is left on the bloodstained ground is a single carnation. His sadness is in contrast to the students around him, who, although one only sees their legs, are clearly poised for more action.

Although not included in the exhibit, one of Golestan's most famous images of the time, published in the "Time Book of the Year 1979," was of two men using an American flag to carry rubbish, taken outside the US Embassy. That same year his photographs for Time magazine won him the prestigious Robert Capa gold medal award.

Golestan's pictures from the Iran-Iraq war depict the destruction but also the bewilderment of a population caught up in a war. He described his first war to Moshefi and Qazvini: "I was in search of the deep human feelings that were buried within each person. I spent eight years looking at death through my camera ... the feelings of shock and violence were so extreme that I felt that it was my duty to let the world know about these horrors, to understand the suffering."

Golestan continued to document the political convulsions that shook his country and the surrounding region, namely the Iran-Iraq war and the horrifying outcome of Saddam Hussein's chemical attack in Kurdistan in 1988. He was just 13 kilometers outside the village of Halabja when Iraqi jets dropped their chemical bombs. One of the first to photograph the aftermath of the massacre, he was angry and incredulous when the Western press, then sympathetic to Saddam Hussein, was uninterested in his photographs. As he stated in a later documentary he made for BBC's Channel Four, "I want to show you images that will be like a slap in your face to shatter your security. You can look away, turn off, hide your identity like murderers, but you cannot stop the truth ..."

Indeed, Golestan's images of violence, death and suffering are not easy to look at, much less process without discomfort, but some of his other photographs do provide some comparative relief, such as his surreal image of clerics conferring at a mullahs' conference on the side of road in Abadan, Iran, in a desolate setting that resembles a no man's land.

If there is one criticism to be made of the LSE exhibition, it is that the relatively small selection of photographs, due to space constraints, leaves one hungry for more. Fortunately, Malu Halasa and Hengameh Golestan's excellent 2008 book also entitled "Kaveh Golestan: Recording the Truth in Iran," provides the reader with a fuller picture of Golestan's work. His tender portraits of prostitutes in Tehran's former red-light district, of desperately poor migrant workers or of dervishes in the Zagros Mountains are accompanied by essays by journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari, BBC journalist Jim Muir, who was with Golestan the day he died, and photographer Mohammad Farnood, among others.

The exhibit compensates for its smaller selection of images by offering an intimate glimpse of his work and personal habits, with its display cases containing everyday objects from Gole-stan's life as a photojournalist. His plasticized press cards need no years on them - they can be tracked by the changes in his hairstyles from the 1960s to the 1980s. His address book lies open to the letter "S," with contacts for the French photo agency Sipa, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph scrawled by hand. There is a packet of the Bahman cigarettes Golestan always smoked (and that his wife still smokes), a contact sheet, numerous clippings of his photos from magazines and newspapers, and snapshots of Hengameh and their son, Mehrak, now a rapper living in London. Golestan was also a gifted writer, and a handwritten diary discovered by his wife as she prepared for this exhibit is propped up in one of the display cases.

Golestan became adept with the video camera in the 1990s and made a film called "Recording the Truth" (from which the exhibit and the book borrow their name) about censorship in Iran's media for BBC's Channel Four, for which he was detained and put under house arrest by the Iranian authorities. He continued to make documentaries, and his last job was as a BBC cameraman, filming in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and ultimately Iraq, where he lost his life. Details of the events leading up to his untimely death can be found on a blog written by BBC journalist Stuart Hughes, who lost part of his leg in the same minefield.

Golestan also lectured at the University of Tehran, where he inspired and encouraged a generation of photojournalists to practice the same in-depth social commentaries in image. Author and journalist Azadeh Moaveni wrote about Golestan in her memoir "Lipstick Jihad" that "with his unrivalled zest for poking into Iran's darkest corners, he taught me, and the Iranian journalists and photographers of my generation, that resistance could be an art and art could be resistance."

Following the stop in London an expanded version of the show will travel to Rotterdam in December and will include Golestan's remarkable portraits of prostitutes and migrant workers. The Iranian people, Golestan often said, were his best subject.

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Recording the Truth in Iran: Photographs by Kaveh GolestanAa runs until December 19 at LSE's Atrium Gallery. For more information, please see www.lse.ac.uk/arts

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