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Pictures of Heaven
04 December 2003Iranian photographer Hengameh Golestan’s name means, literally, “spectacular rose garden,” a fact she notes in a feature for the Irish webmagazine Nth Position not to boast, but to point to the sad irony of the village of Mahabad, the name of which means “The place to go.” Golestan’s photographs of the Iranian Kurdish residents of the town suggest otherwise. Overwhelmed with the work of collecting cow dung, a precious commodity, to heat their homes, they receive no support from their government, which fears an uprising like those of Iraq and Turkey. And yet, Golestan’s images of the town’s women at prayer mark Mahabad as a place that is holy, even if it is not a place to go. Elsewhere on Nth Position another photo essay by Golestan, “Heaven and Hell,” locates sacred space far above a dry and troubled land, as Iranian women in chadors leave behind their posters of the ayotollah, propped against their van, to paraglide. It’s hard for Americans to look at these pictures and fail to recall The Flying Nun, but the photographs above them -- of an Iranian girl forced into marriage -- remind the viewer that the kind of theocratic rule that enforces dress codes just isn’t funny. A fact Golestan must know all too well -- she is the widow of Pulitzer-Prize-winning BBC photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, director of a documentary about Iranian fundamentalism and censorship called Recording the Truth. He was killed by a landmine this past spring while doing just that in Northern Iraq, the same day Nth Position published his wife’s photographs of veiled women finding freedom in Iranian skies.
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