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.
An exhibition of one of his most dramatic subjects — prostitutes confined to Capital’s red-light district known as the Citadel of Shahr-e No (New City) — opens in the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam on Thursday and runs through May 4. The complete collection of 61 images will appear as part of a larger photographic, painting and film exhibition on Iran entitled “Unedited History: Homeland 1960-2014,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris from May 16 to Aug. 24.
