Reza @ Frontline Club
At 16-years-old a young Iranian photographer’s father said, “If you believe in what you are doing, then go ahead and do it.”
Reza was just 16-years-old, but he had already hit a crossroads. For taking a picture and telling the story of an exploited market worker in his school magazine, the Savak - Iran’s equivalent of the KGB - decided to pay him a visit. He was told that if he were to publish another magazine, both his life and that of his parents would be over.
“My father’s words we’re what motivated me to carry on,” the 57-year-old father of two now says. “I knew I would be in trouble, but I just had to take care not to be caught to soon,” he says.
Fortunately he only lost three years of his life to his next encounter with the law, while studying architecture (photography wasn’t an option) at the University of Tehran. Anonymous photographs of impoverished people living on the outskirts of the city kept popping up overnight on the university walls. It didn’t take long to deduce the culprit and six months of solitary confinement with ‘days and nights of torture’ set the pace for the only three years in Reza’s life spent without a camera.
“It did not break me,” he says. But the French lilt on his pan-Middle Eastern accent gives away the next punishment for his passion.
Once freed from prison in 1978 Reza faced Iran on the cusp of revolution. He returned to study, but while looking out of his university window he saw tanks open fire on students protesting in the street. “In amongst them was a student with a camera, running,” he says. “I spent the next three days photographing and after thirty years I still haven’t been back.” Back to an office, nor back to Iran. Commissioned by Newsweek to cover the insurgency from the inside, Reza fell from popularity with the Ayatollah - who overthrew the Shah in 1979 - and has not seen his native land since 1981.
Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, France and countries all over Asia and Africa have become his second home. A new book, Reza War + Peace, has been released to commemorate 30 years of the journey, but Reza assures there are at least twenty more years to come. “I have never felt nothing, every moment is full of passion and love,” he says of his life behind the lens. His ability to empathise with exile, for example, has helped him cover life in the Rwandan refugee camps of the mid 1990s. Yet despite his exposure to the greatest disasters, his style is far from sensationalist. “A mother’s eyes say more than the body of a dead son,” he explains, adding that his projects also aim to look at both sides of the coin. “Dancing, playing and relaxing can be happening in the same city, at the same time.”
The results have moved many who have seen the exhibition which accompanies the book-launch to tears. Currently in Caens, France, we can get a sneak preview at Paddington’s Frontline Club next week where Reza will be reading from his book.
“So many times I have taken the photo without knowing if it is properly focussed or not because of the tears in my eyes,” he says. This impact he manages to share with viewers, as well as Aina - his multi-media training agency for women and children in countries where freedom of press is under threat - are Reza’s greatest professional pride.
Personally, however, it is his and his wife Rachel’s 15-year-old son Delazad and 11-year-old daughter Djanan that are top of the tree.
Currently all together in Sicily for French spring holidays (Paris is home), it’s by no means your average beach holiday.
Rachel is a novelist, who combines her skill to compliment Reza’s images with text. Reza is working on a community photo project in Librino, one of the island’s poorest new town-style developments. Delazad is working out a way to get to General Secretary of the UN and Djanan her path to be an actress and humanitarian.
With all that he’s witnessed, Reza still believes a bright day might yet await our children. “One day I am sure students of the future will look back and marvel at what barbarians we were,” he says. “If one part of the human body is suffering, then all the body will suffer. We need to wake up and remember that the history of humanity is progress.”
Reza, War and Peace - 30 Years on the Front Lines is at The Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, Paddington, on Tuesday, March 2. £10. 7pm. Call 020 7479 8950. See www.frontlineclub.com
www.memorial-caen.fr/portail/index.php
Permalink | March 10, 2009