Hi everybody, welcome to The Rest Is History.
It's Dominic here and I'm thrilled to be unveiling our latest exclusive mini-series for our Rest Is History club members.
We will be plunging into the history of photography and, in particular, what photography tells us about history.
I'm joined by my friend, the great portrait photographer Chris Floyd, who is going to be talking us through some particular historical moments.
So we'll be looking at revolutions the Arab Spring, the Prague Spring, the revolution in Romania in 1989.
We'll be talking about music.
So the blues, David Bowie and so on.
We'll be looking at fashion and the role that photography has played in the transformation of fashion.
And finally, we'll be talking about technology how technology has changed photography and how photography has, in turn, affected the way that we see history.
So this is a brilliant series.
It's a lot of fun.
We would love as many people as possible to join up and to see this series, with me and Chris talking about some of the most iconic images in recent history.
And in this first episode, we are looking at revolutions.
And here is a lovely little clip.
Iran.
Right.
We're back to Iran again.
Yeah, so 1979.
So what I've really tried to do with these is give you, If you're interested in this subject, who is the photographer that best defines that subject.
Right.
And I've picked one...
One photographer for each of the four revolutions that we're going to cover here.
So Iran 79.
The person you really want to look at is a man called.
He was known by a singular name, Abbas.
Right.
His full name was Abbas Attar, but he's known professionally as Abbas.
He was born in 1944.
I mean, really, his life's work really was documenting... the effect of religion on people.
Isn't that interesting?
So, so he's Iranian himself, right?
He was born in Iran, but he left Iran and then he was.
He grew up in Algeria and then he returned to Iran during the I mean as an adult.
He lived most of his life in Paris.
And after he documented the sort of 79-80 Iranian Revolution, he was exiled, really.
He didn't go back to Iran until, I think, 1997 was the next time he went back.
But 79, 80, he really was, he seemed to be, he seemed to be everywhere.
I mean, we've got five examples, five pictures of his hair, but he seemed to be everywhere and covering everything which you know for a huge country like geographic, you know physically huge country like Iran, is quite something.
So this is the Ayatollah.
He's second from right.
Yes.
And he is calling upon Ayatollah Shariat Madari to appease tensions between their respective followers.
That is as much as I know about this.
You know, I'm really picking pictures that really convey the tension and drama of it.
So this is Khomeini has been back for just under a year.
And actually I suppose the fact that you're telling that story is a reminder that actually for the first, oh actually for years, for about the first two or three years of the revolution, the revolution is in complete flux.
Nobody knows necessarily how many is going to win and what role he's going to play in the new regime.
And there are other power brokers, I guess, other Ayatollahs.
I mean, it's similar in a way to the Russian Revolution, isn't it?
In that all those factions after 1917 didn't really settle down.
It's obvious to us now, looking back, that we impose a patty on it, that we think OK, these guys are obviously always going to win.
But nobody knows this at the time.
And there are different Islamic groups.
There are different groups of Mujahideen kind of fighting for the streets and whatnot.
Um, and how does i mean the fact that abbas is in the room?
Yeah, that's the astonishing thing that he's in the room, because he's in the room here and then at some point uh, i mean that's six months later that he's out in the desert with this, you know, when the us tried to rescue the hostages, which we'll come to in a minute, But he's all over the place.
You know, he's obviously really well connected and fed with information.
You know, how he got into that room, I have no idea.
Yeah.
But the fact that they let him in and they also, you know, he was able to photograph, not only photograph this, but also he got out and he got the film out.
You know, this is so much of this story.
These revolution pictures are about people who have to smuggle film yeah out, not only out of a room, but out of a country.
Yeah, you know, but in his case it surely makes a massive difference that he's iranian, that he's born in iran and he's a muslim yeah, so he's that.
He has, you know, two cards to play with the regime.
I guess that a western photographer would not have.
Yeah, but he He, obviously.
He didn't endear himself to the Khomeini regime after that because, you know, he was exiled and went off to live in Paris for 17 years.
So should we look at some of the other photos that he took?
So we did Operation, the operation in the desert, Operation Eagle Claw.
Eagle Claw.
Colonel Charlie Beckwith. and his attempt to rescue the hostages with Delta Force.
Obviously, disaster for the Americans and disaster for Jimmy Carter's presidency.
And actually, I hadn't seen this until you showed it to me.
It's not terribly well known.
So he went out to the desert.
And there really is no way.
You look at Google Maps and took a photograph of the wreckage of the of the helicopter.
I guess it's an image of humiliation for the United States, isn't it?
For the Americans, it's absolutely about the humiliation.
I mean, it's just best laid plans and all that.
And just as an image.
It's the image of the crashed wreckage against the emptiness, I guess, of the desert and the huge wide horizon.
But I wonder if they came... Because there's not a lot of the actual body of the helicopter there.
Do you think they would have come?
They came back and destroyed, Because the Americans have always got technology that's better than everybody else's.
Oh no, they didn't go back.
They didn't go back right no, they didn't go back.
Um, they just i mean, that's the amazing thing, they abandoned the stuff.
But also in the helicopter yeah, were the plans of the mission right and the iranians were able to get the kind of charred fragments of paper and exhibit them to the world that i didn't know.
That that bit, i didn't know.
So yeah, I mean it could not have been a greater catastrophe.
And then you've got another image from the U.S.
Embassy, haven't you, where the hostages are being kept?
Yeah, this is mob in front of the embassy.
Researching this and looking at a lot of revolution pictures.
One of the themes that comes up again and again and again is mobs.
Yeah.
And after a while of looking at this I realised that one mob is kind of pretty much the same as any other mob.
Yeah.
The thing about the mob that becomes the image certainly for the Americans of the Iranian revolution.
I think the reason the Iranian revolution had such an impact on US domestic opinion was the otherness of it.
So it's men with beards.
We've got the forbidding-looking priests and clerics in the photo with the Ayatollahs.
And then this picture, it's the sort of frenzy of it.
I think for people you know, if you're sitting in Wisconsin watching on TV or something or opening a newspaper, that's what people found unsettling, because they didn't appreciate that.
I guess the strength of feeling the fervor against the Shah, but also the religious dimensions abbas was specialized him.
But how did the ayatollah, how was it possible for him, to enable uh, this kind of to channel this, this rate?
Because the one of the things you read a lot about is how, you know, iranians are persians yeah, they're not arabs yeah um, how was he able to kind of take this, find this this, uh sort of Islamic fervor within a country that's Persian and not
Oh well, I think, their particular brand of Islam, so Shia.
The fact that they're embattled and they're surrounded by Sunnis is obviously very important to explaining Iranian mentality.
And it's where I think religion and nationalism kind of fuse.
These protests, these enormous street demonstrations have been going while he was in exile.
So they've been building and building every 40 days, in 1978, with the funerals of the last people who'd been shot.
Then there would be another 40 days later, huge crowds on the streets.
The Shah's secret police would shoot some more people.
And that meant that 40 days later, there will be another set of funerals and another of these enormous sort of outpourings of rage.
And I think some of the energy, to me, comes from the contrast between...
These people who are so fired up and are so there's such passion and such a sort of loss of control, in a way.
And then that is being focused through somebody who is the incarnation of austerity and control.
You know the Ayatollah.
When Khomeini returns at the beginning of 1979 and he says famously on the plane to Peter Jennings, as he's coming in, Peter Jennings says what do you feel?
What are your feelings?
And he says, I feel nothing.
And there's something about the sort of the coldness, the self-control that in a weird way well, it makes him kind of otherworldly yeah, it makes him seem holy, and i think that almost the fact that he's not giving into the same passions that they are it makes him in even greater focus for excitement.
People do view him as a kind of holy man yeah, and as um and as the the emblem of a kind of unchanging authentic Iran that the Shah had betrayed, I guess.
The Shah was too Western and the Shah was corrupt and all of these kinds of things.
And so people projected all of this onto the sort of what appeared to be the kind of blank slate of Khomeini.
And then he was, you know, I think...
It's underappreciated how pragmatic, how calculating how cold-blooded he was, in kind of using that, tapping it, eliminating his rivals and building his power.
Because the other thing you also get from this, I sense, is that it takes actually quite a small...
In a population.
It takes quite a small percentage of people if they are fervent enough, motivated enough.
You know, it's like, if you look at politics in Western Europe now, it's really a very small number of people that are passionate enough to really want to join a political party these days.
Yeah, of course.
And it's that thing.
If you have a small number of people who are committed...
And willing to go all the way.
You can do a lot.
Of course.
You can do a lot.
The crowds are enormous, though.
I mean, the crowds are vast.
I mean, we're talking about millions of people sometimes on the streets.
I mean, it really is.
I think he tapped something.
It's not just about a small group of extremists.
I think he tapped something.
A sense that you know, the country had changed so much in the previous 10 years, things spiraling out of control and people yearned for a kind of reassurance.
Traditional, they thought, traditional values uh, sense of solidarity, all of those kinds of things they felt that he and his um sort of faction offered.
What about the last photo that you've got of a bass?
This is armed mullahs marching past the Ayatollah's house.
What I like about this, there were lots of photos taken in the Iranian Revolution.
I mean photographers were always drawn to the women in their kind of black cloaks and their khadors.
I mean so much of the sort of the imagery of that was really unsettling to Westerners because they saw it as part of the oppression of women more not understandably.
But it's interesting how prominent women are now in these photos.
Yeah.
Abbas has a lot of great pictures of Iranian women.
Yeah.
You know, all dressed more often than not like that.
There's a very, there's a great picture he took of them doing target practice.
Yeah, with the guns.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think what's unsettling about it is the display of austerity, visual austerity, isn't it?
I mean, everything about that picture represents a form of austerity, doesn't it?
Nobody's smiling.
Everybody's grim faced.
Yeah.
Can I ask one more question about the bats and his photographs of the Iranian revolution?
How important is it?
Do you think that they are black and white?
It's the black and white images that seem to linger in the mind.
I mean yeah, because because they are.
It's essentially that they're monotonal images scenes, aren't they?
You know, there's people in black yeah, and white, and there's very little color there.
You know, if you look at the color one, i mean there's almost there's no actual color.
I mean there's a tiny flash of blue somewhere here.
Yeah yeah, everyone's in black.
That's it.
Everyone else is in black.
Can i just ask you a quick question before we move on to the next revolution?
So the tension between black and white and colour and photography is
By and large, why is it that a photographer now would choose black and white?
Because so many of the photographs that we're going to be looking at are black and white and they're taken in an age when colour was possible.
Yeah.
So why do photographers, what's that choice as a photographer?
Well, there's a combination of practical things.
One which was you could process and print black and white film much more easily in a hotel room bathroom.
You can build a darkroom in a hotel room bathroom and process and print.
Colour is much, much, much more difficult to do.
And then also, you know, you have things like newspapers of the time.
You know, apart from your things like Time magazine and Life magazine, you know most newspapers then didn't really print colour.
No, of course.
I mean, today, Eddie Shaw was the first British newspaper in colour.
So until then, there was actually no need for it.
If you're supplying hard news, which is fundamentally what a lot of this is, there's no market for it.
Okay, one other question, which has never occurred to me before until you were just talking.
So someone like Abbas who goes to Iran to do these photos, or indeed the people who go to Vietnam or whatever, they're never doing this really, with a book in mind particularly.
They're thinking about short-term clients, as in I will sell these to the Time magazine or the Washington Post or whoever.
That's the the plan and if the book does come of that, that's an accident that comes later.
Yeah, but the point is that the sort of the short term.
I think some of these people were probably much more um focused on documenting things because they felt that they needed to be documented.
They were driven by not necessarily driven by the daily okay, grind of of supplying an image to the paper.
I think Abbas is someone who He was drawn to religious projects his whole life.
Well, he was drawn to religious projects.
I mean, he did projects on Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism.
I mean, he did a seven-year project on militant Islam, sorry, on jihadism after 9-11.
He spent seven years documenting that in 16 countries.
Yeah, wow.
So it becomes a sort of passion project as much as anything.
And almost probably quite addictive that you seek out another conflict.
Because there's always more to do, isn't there?
Thank you for listening or watching if you were indeed watching.
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And on that bombshell, bye-bye.
