Revolutions: Iran, the Prague Spring, and Ceaușescu’s Fall | History in Photos

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1:26Dominic Sandbrook:Floyd, who is going to be talking us through some particular historical moments. So we'll be looking at revolutions, the Arab Spring, the Prague Spring, the revolution in Romania in 1989. We'll be talking about music. So the blues, David Bowie and so on. We'll be looking at fashion and the role that photography has played in the transformation of fashion. And finally, we'll be talking about technology, how technology has changed photography and how photography has in turn affected the way that we see history so this is a brilliant series it's a lot of fun we would love as many people as possible to join up and to see this series with me and chris talking about some of the most iconic images in recent history and in this first episode we are looking at revolutions and here is a lovely little clip iran right we're back to iran again yeah so 1979 79 so what i've really tried to do with these yeah is give you if you if you're interested in this subject who is the photographer that best defines that that subject right and i've picked one one photographer for each of the four revolutions that we're yeah we're going to cover here so iran 79 that the person you really want to look at is a man called um where he was known by a singular name abbas right his full name was abbas atar but he's known professionally as a bass he was born in 1944 i mean really his life's work really was documenting the effect of religion on people yeah isn't that interesting so so he's iranian himself right he was born in iran but he left iran and then he was he grew up in algeria and then he returned to iran during the i mean as an adult he lived most of his life in paris and after he documented the sort of 79 80 yeah iranian revolution he really he was exiled really he didn't he didn't go back to uh iran until i think 1997 was the next time he went back but 79 80 he really was he seemed to be he seemed to be everywhere i mean we've got five example five pictures of his here but he seemed to be everywhere and covering everything which you know for a huge country like geographic you know physically huge country like iran is quite something so this is the ayatollah he's second from right yes and he is coming uh he's calling upon ayatollah shariat madari to appease tensions between their respective followers that is as much as i know about this okay i'm you know i'm really picking pictures that really convey the tension and drama of it so this is um khomeini has been back for just under a year and actually i suppose the the fact that you're telling that story is a reminder that actually for the first oh actually for years for about the first two or three years the revolution the revolution is in complete flux nobody knows necessarily the khomeini is going to win and what role he's going to play in the new regime yeah and there are other power brokers i guess other ayatollahs i mean it's similar in a way to the russian revolution isn't it in that all those factions after the after 1917 yeah it's not obvious it's obvious to us now looking back that we impose a pattern on it that we think okay these guys are obviously always going to win but nobody knows this at the time and there are different islamic groups there are different groups of mujahideen kind of fighting for the streets and whatnot um and how does i mean the fact that abbas is in the room yeah that's the astonishing thing but he's in the room because he's in the room here and then at some point uh i mean that's six months later that he's out in the desert with this you know when the u.s tried to rescue the hostages which we'll come to in a minute but he he's he's all over the place you know he's he's obviously really well well connected and fed with information you know how he got into that room i don't i have no idea yeah but the fact that they they let him in and they also you know he was able to photograph not only photograph this but also he got out and he got he got the film out you know this is so much of this these revolution pictures are about people who have to smuggle film yeah out not only out of a room but out of a country yeah you know but in his case it surely makes a massive difference that he's iranian that he's born in iran and he's a muslim yeah so he's he has you know two cards to play with the regime i guess that a western photographer would not have yeah but he obviously he didn't he didn't um endear himself to to the khomeini regime after that because you know but he he was exiled and went off to live in paris for yeah for 17 years so should we look at some of the other photos that he took so we did um operation uh the operation in the desert operation eagle claw eagle claw uh colonel charlie beckwith and his attempt to rescue the hostages um with delta force obviously disaster for the americans and disaster for jimmy carter's presidency and actually i hadn't seen this until you showed it to me it's not terribly well known so he went out to the desert and it really is in the middle of nowhere you look at google maps and took a photograph of the wreckage of the uh of the helicopter i guess it's an image of humiliation for the united states isn't it for the americans yeah it's absolutely about the humiliation i mean it just best laid plans and all that so and just as an image it's the image of the crashed wreckage against the the emptiness i guess of the desert and the huge wide horizon but i wonder if they came because there's not a lot of the help the actual body of the helicopter there do you think they would have come they they came back and destroyed because the americans have got always got technology that's uh better than everybody else's oh no they didn't go back they didn't go back right no they didn't go back um they just i mean that's the amazing thing they abandoned the stuff but also in the helicopter yeah were the plans of the mission right and the iranians are able to get the kind of charred fragments of paper and exhibit them to the world that i didn't know that that bit i didn't know so yeah i mean it could not have been a greater catastrophe and then you've got another image from the u.s embassy haven't you where the i mean one of the hostages are being are being kept uh yeah this is mob in front of the embassy researching this and looking at a lot of revolution pictures one of the themes that comes up again and again and again is mobs yeah and after a while of looking at this i realized that one mob is kind of pretty much the same as any other mob yeah um the thing about the mob right that that becomes the image for the setting for the americans of the iranian revolution i think the reason the iranian revolution had such an impact on u.s domestic opinion was the otherness of it yeah so it's member beards you know we've got the forbidding looking priests and the clerics in the photo with the ayatollahs and then this picture it's the sort of frenzy of it that i think for people you know if you're sitting in wisconsin watching on tv or something or opening a newspaper that's what people found unsettling because they didn't appreciate that the i guess the strength of feeling the fervor against the shah but also the religious dimension yeah abbas was specialized in but how did the ayatollah how is it possible for him to enable uh this kind of to channel this this right because one of the things you read a lot about is how you know iranians are persians yeah they're not arabs yeah um how was he able to kind of take this find this this uh sort of islamic fervor within a country that's persian and not oh well i think um their particular brand of islam so shia the fact that they're embattled and they're surrounded by sunnis is obviously very important to explaining iranian mentality um and it's it's where i think religion and nationalism kind of fuse yeah these protests these enormous uh street demonstrations have been going while he was in exile so they've been building and building every 40 days in 1978 with the funerals of the last people who'd been shot then there would be another 40 days later huge crowds on the streets the shah's um secret police would shoot some more people and that meant that 40 days later there will be another set of funerals and another of these um enormous sort of outpourings of rage and i think some of the energy to me comes from the the contrast between these people who are so fired up and are so um there's such passion and such a sort of loss of control in a way and then that is being focused through somebody who's the incarnation of austerity and control you know the ayatollah when khomini returns at the beginning of 1979 and he says famously on the plane to peter jennings as he's coming in.

9:40Dominic Sandbrook:Peter Jennings says, what do you feel? What are your feelings? And he says, I feel nothing. And there's something about the sort of the coldness, the self-control, that in a weird way, well, it makes him kind of otherworldly. It makes him seem holy. And I think that almost, the fact that he's not giving in to the same passions that they are, it makes him an even greater focus for excitement. People do view him as a kind of holy man. And as the emblem of a kind of unchanging, authentic Iran that the Shah had betrayed, I guess. The Shah was too Western and the Shah was corrupt and all of these kinds of things.

10:17Dominic Sandbrook:And so people projected all of this onto what appeared to be the blank slate of Khomeini. And then he was, I think it's underappreciated how pragmatic, how calculating, how cold-blooded he was in kind of using that, tapping it, eliminating his rivals and building his power. Because the other thing you also get from this eye sense is that it takes actually quite a small, in a population, it takes quite a small percentage of people. Yeah. If they are fervent enough. Yeah. Motivated enough. You know, it's like if you look at politics in Western Europe now, it's really a very small number of people that are passionate enough to really want to join a political party these days.

10:59Yeah, of course. And it's that thing. If you have a small number of people who are committed and willing to go all the way, you can do a lot. Of course.

11:07Dominic Sandbrook:you can do a lot the crowds are enormous though yeah i mean the crowds are vast i mean we're talking about millions of people sometimes on the streets i mean it really is um i think he tapped something it's not just about a small group of extremists i think he tapped something a sense that you know the country had changed so much in the previous 10 years things spiraling out of control and people yearned for a kind of reassurance traditional they saw it's traditional values a sense of solidarity all of those kinds of things they felt that he and his um sort of faction offered what about the last photo that you've got of abbas this is armed mullahs marching past the ayatollah's house i think what i like about this so there were lots of photos taking the iranian revolution i mean photographers were always drawn to the women in their kind of black cloaks and and um their hadors i mean so much of the sort of the imagery of that was really unsettling to westerners because they saw it as part of the um oppression of women and whatnot understandably but it's interesting how prominent women are now in these photos yeah abbas has a lot of great pictures of iranian women yeah you know all dressed more often than not like that there's a very there's a great picture we took of them doing target yeah with the guns with guns yeah i think what's unsettling about it is the display of austerity visual austerity isn't it i mean everything about that picture represents a form of austerity doesn't it nobody's smiling yeah everybody's grim faced yeah can i ask one more question about abbas and his photographs of the Iranian revolution how important is it do you think that they are black and white it's the black and white images that seem to linger in the mind you have i mean yeah because because they are it's essentially that they're monotonal scenes aren't they you know there's people in black yeah and white and there's very little color there you know if you look at the color one i mean there's almost there's no actual color i mean there's a tiny flash of blue somewhere here yeah yeah everyone's in black that's it everyone else is in black can i'll just ask you a quick question before we move on to the next revolution so the tension between black and white and color and photography by and large why is it that a photographer now would choose black and white because of so many of the photographs that we're going to be looking at are black and white and they're taken in an age when color was possible yeah so why do photographers what is what's that well there's a combination of practical things one which was you could process and print print black and white film much more easily right in a hotel room bathroom okay build a dark room in a hotel room bathroom and process and print color is much much much more difficult to do and then also you know you have things like newspapers of the time you know apart from your things like time magazine and life magazine you know most newspapers then print didn't really print color no i mean today 1986 eddie shah was the first first british newspaper in color you know so until then there was actually no need for it you know if you're dealing with if you're supplying hard news which is fundamentally what a lot of this is yeah um there's there's no mark there's no market for it okay one other question which is i never occurred to me before until you were just talking so someone like abbas who goes to iran to do these photos or indeed the people who go to vietnam or whatever they're never doing this really with a book in mind particularly they're thinking about short-term clients as in i will sell these to the time magazine or the washington post or whoever that's the the plan and if the book does come of that that's an accident that comes later yeah but the point is the the sort of the short term i think some of these people were probably much more um focused on documenting things because they felt that they needed to be documented they were driven by not necessarily driven by the daily okay grind of of supplying an image to the paper i think abbas is someone who is was drawn to religious projects his whole life where he was drawn to religious projects i mean he did projects on judaism christianity hinduism buddhism yeah i mean he's a seven-year project on militant islam yeah on j sorry on jihadism yeah after 9-11 he spent seven years documenting that in 16 countries yeah wow so it becomes a sort of passion project as much as anything and almost probably quite addictive that you seek out another conflict or you see because there's always more to do isn't there thank you for listening or watching if you were indeed watching now if you want to see the rest of that episode and the other episodes that are coming in this tremendous series in the next three weeks then all you need to do is to head to the rest is history.com and sign up to join the club and not only will you get this terrific series with me and chris floyd you will get a host of unbelievable benefits now chris and i will be back next week to talk about photography and music so make sure you come back for that and don't miss out and on that bombshell, bye bye