Re-Creating the Citadel and the Photographs of Kaveh Golestan

Photography and public memory

Re-creating the Citadel and the Photographs of Kaveh Golestan is a political archaeology of a little-known crime committed in the early days of the nascent Islamic state in Iran in 1979. The starting point and artistic core of the book are sixty-one photographs taken between 1975 and 1977 by photographer Kaveh Golestan, who documented Tehran’s red-light district a few years before it was violently set ablaze and wiped from the urban landscape and social memory. The book recovers the site and the social and spatial experiences associated with the area: its relationship to human life, the polis, social aesthetics, politics and dynamics, and the relationship between marginal and metropolitan citizenry. The project restores it to social memory and the public domain as a catalyzing moment in the establishment and preservation of a state-imposed project of violence against citizens and history itself.