Iran Snapshots: Baba’s lost photo

http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/jan/13/iran-snapshots-mosaddegh-lost-photo

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We don’t have many family heirlooms. We have one. A photograph of my father with Mohammad Mosaddegh. It’s black-and-white, taken in the early 1950s. He is wearing a smart tailored suit reminiscent of the ones in 1930s gangster movies from America. He sits on the left of the shot, one hand cupped in the palm of the other, seemingly a resolute man in a relaxed mood. But he isn’t relaxed; this is my father’s respectful pose, for he is in the presence of greatness.

He is sitting forward in an armchair facing the famous bed of Dr Mosaddegh, Iran’s strong willed PM, who nationalized the Iranian oil industry, robbing the British of their “rights”. For that crime he would be severely punished, but at the time he was still in office and holding court as he often did from his bed. And my father, a young, eager journalist who worshipped the man he called “Pishva”, had been granted an unexpected audience.

My father wanted this moment preserved and was forward enough to take along the staff photographer from his small-circulation paper to record the meeting with his idol. Was he looking simply for a shot to accompany a news story? Or did he wish only to have a memento of his favourite politician? Did he know that with this photograph he would inextricably link himself to Iranian history?

Between the armchair and the bed, a coffee table is strewn with newspapers. There is a window behind Dr Mosaddegh. He is sitting up on what looks like a hospital bed. The photograph apparently captures an everyday scene of an old and ailing man being visited by a younger one. My father is barely able to stop grinning from ear to ear. I feel that clenched fist pushing into his other hand is to help him stop from indecorously exposing his sheer joy at being in that room.

This photograph, a keepsake he would treasure throughout his life, would by turns occupy pride of place in his various homes or be stored out of the way, in keeping with the oscillating politics in the country and my father’s chequered fortunes as a husband and head of household. I remember it as my first lesson in the history of my nation. “That is me, see,” he would point proudly to the now framed photo on our mantelpiece, “your Baba, with Dr Mosaddegh.” And then he would tell me about the old man sitting amongst the rumpled bedding and what he had achieved for us all.

My father left Iran in 1981, and did not return for over a decade. In his absence his possessions were confiscated by the revolutionary court. What he owned was scattered to the four winds. So too was this photograph.

In 1993 he was allowed back into the country. He was an enthusiastic returnee, enjoying meeting friends and family unburdened by the orderly habits of a life in the west. Every day he would attend lunch at yet another relative’s. He was doing the rounds, making up for lost time.

Over one such lunch in Tehran, the host, a distant cousin stood up from the table and removed a framed picture that was hanging in his sitting room – possibly quite high on the wall, as is the fashion in more traditional Iranian homes. Turning it over, he removed the nails and the panel from the back of the frame, and extracted the long-lost photograph of my father with the nationalist prime minister from behind an innocuous, decorative landscape.

“I kept this for you, Ahmad. Thought you’d like to have it now.”

The photograph had been sitting behind the landscape for nearly 15 years. Many other people might have chosen to destroy it, since both men it depicted were now on the wrong side of the ideology of the land.

My brothers and I each have a digital copy of that black-and-white photograph of the eager young man in the presence of his hero. For me it is the most precious of heirlooms left to us by my father, who was a man with little regard for material possessions. It is a piece of our personal family lore woven into the larger narrative of a nation. It places us firmly within our country, connecting us, no matter where we choose to live.

It seems that every 30 years, we Iranians are condemned not just to hiding but to eradicating our personal memories. At the time of the revolution, photographs and books were destroyed in countless numbers for fear they would be taken as evidence of impiety or politically contentious behavior. These were burned or buried by families themselves, in acts that seemed like distant legend to someone like myself who did not directly experience the turbulent transition from monarchy to Islamic republic.

After the disputed 2009 presidential election, the legend became reality again, this time through the delete button as we destroyed our electronically stored data. I will never forget the days when my friends and I systematically purged our computers of all emails, photos and writings that might have been seen as problematic by agents of the government before we sought to leave the country, in my case to go to the wedding of friends in neighbouring Turkey.

For me, the images held in family albums are like the pixels that form the bigger picture of a nation, each personal memory an integral part of the collective memory. And so every photo destroyed, no matter how banal the subject, is akin to the deletion of a pixel from the whole, blurring the view of a time and a place. A nation forced to erase its personal history at this cellular level is condemned to a broader historical amnesia and thus doomed to repeat its mistakes. This amnesia is a boon to those ready to fill the gaps left by the lost pixels with their own colours and textures. History Photoshopped. They call it historic revisionism in academic circles; I call it effacement – erasing the right to have been a part of a place, the right to be.

Every seemingly throw-away photograph and every pedestrian personal memory is precious for a country such as mine. We Iranians need to see and understand our land through multiple viewfinders of memory and identity to achieve a more complete and inclusive image. Each time we select a frame before we release the shutter, we create a new reality. It’s only in the plurality of the frames that we may hope to construct anything resembling a true likeness of Iran.

The stories that follow are a series of personal snapshots captured by someone who has lived, for the most part, in the bubble of affluent, bilingual north Tehran after a significant number of years away. They are merely a handful of pixels to add to the vast unseen panorama that is contemporary Iran, a country whose complex reality is often hidden behind cliched images mounted on the face of the picture frame.

<em>Haleh Anvari is an artist and the founder of AKSbazi.com, a crowd sourcing site about Iran. </em>

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