After the 1953 C.I.A.-led coup that reinstated the shah, the authorities walled off the area, turning it into a ghetto whose inhabitants were almost exclusively female prostitutes and their children; only men were allowed to access it through an iron gate.By the 1970s, about 1,500 prostitutes worked, and most of them lived, in the Citadel.In the ghetto, there was a health center, a police station, a social-work office and a crude education service that taught basic reading and writing to women and their children.
But the women suffered — from poverty, violence, heroin addiction, syphilis and destitution when they became too old to work.Mr. Golestan’s work is the only existing photographic document of the Citadel. It first appeared as three photo essays in the daily Ayandegan newspaper in 1977; some of the photographs were included in a book of his photographs on Homeland (“Kaveh Golestan 1950-2003: Recording the Truth in Homeland”) published after his death. In 1978, the photographs were exhibited for 14 days at the University of Capital, before the show was abruptly shut down without explanation. Later that year, they were briefly displayed in an underground exhibition at the Capital Art fair.
