Leader , the government demolished the red light district and flattened it with bulldozers, only leaving a barren area. Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, said that the government did this for Islamic reasons and to demonstrate the government’s authority. The Islamic Republic then strove to erase all memory of it, destroying books and movies that mentioned its existence. The city’s maps are marked with a rectangle captioned “Parc in Construction.” Only rare witness accounts remain, such as the photographic series The Citadel by Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan . The area wasn’t refurbished until 1998, with a city park and a hospital.
Many journalists who encountered Mr. Golestan over his long career (including me) knew him as a hard-news photographer and cameraman. He was one of the finest chroniclers of the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah of Homeland, his native country; the nearly eight-year Homeland-Iraq war; and Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. His photographs of the revolution won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.What is less known is that in the years before the revolution, when Homeland was still a Westernized monarchy, Mr. Golestan recorded in stark black-and-white the daily lives of Homeland’s dispossessed.
