The Importance of Telex: Iran

Our feature story on Paolo Pellegrin (page 58) looks at a new movement in photojournalism. But there is no way to talk about what's coming next in photojournalism without honoring the ground-breaking work that has inspired photojournalists for the past 20 years: Telex: Iran, Gilles Peress's book of photos taken of Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution. It showed photographers a new way to tell stories with images, and established Peress's reputation as "a photographer's photographer."

"It is one of the most exciting books to come out of the post World War II period," says photojournalist Gary Knight. "He broke with a lot of the traditional methodology of photojournalism at the time."

Peress traveled to Iran in late 1979, while Iranian students were holding more than 50 Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, an episode that marked America's first confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism. The book's jam-packed compositions, startling cropping, and tilted horizons made it "a brilliant visual nervousness between covers," in the words of photographer Cornell Capa.

"The subject of the book was never the Iranian revolution per se," Peress says. Living in New York in the late Seventies, a "decadent" period of drugs and freedom, Peress says, "What interested me was that the Iranians had managed to pierce that bubble." In designing the book, Peress ran brief photo captions in the back. The text that appears next to the photos are excerpts from telexes sent between him and his agents at Magnum Paris.

Peress notes, "If you read between the lines of the telexes, it's all about here?New York?and there?Tehran. It's about my relationship with Magnum, about a failed relationship with a girl, about the function of the media, the caption mistakes. From the beginning, the book was intended as a deconstruction and not as journalism."

In the latest volume of The Photobook, photographer Martin Parr and critic Gerry Badger (showcased on page 64) describe Telex: Iran as "a book that shows the uncertainties rather than the certainties of bearing witness to world events."

"Let's put to rest the fiction of objectivity, this idea that 'This is the world and we are telling you how things are,'"says Peress. "Photography is highly subjective. I'd rather be honest about and say this is little me, Gilles, and I'm a distorting prism. I'd rather be up front about that, in order to give the readers a fighting chance to reconstruct things for themselves. There's a certain honesty in being highly subjective."

In a climate in which Iranians were demonized in the West, the book did not find a publisher until 1984, but was soon embraced by photojournalists.

"To me, it's photojournalism at its best. It's a way of telling not just one story but so many stories in one image," says photographer Jan Grarup. "He could have done what a lot of press photographers would have done?tried to get close to the hostages and created, to be honest, boring pictures that wouldn't have told the story of Iran at all. As I see it, Gilles succeeded in doing a story about a country, a country going through dramatic change."

The book's nuanced and highly personal storytelling seemed shocking when it was first published, but it has since spawned many imitators.

"A lot of people have aped what he did, and done it less well," says Knight. "I think the work was very visual, very esthetically challenging, but what I find interesting is that it also had strong journalistic integrity."

Knight adds, "He's one of the most influential photographers ever, and one of the most important journalists."