Acts of Memory: Gilles Peress’s Telex: Iran,Then and Now

As an Iranian I want you corresponders [sic] and journalists and film-takers [sic] tell the truth to the world – 20 December 1979. (Text from an English-language sign outside the US Embassy in Tehran, photographed by Gilles Peress) ¹

On 4 November 1978, three Iranian students were shot dead by Pahlavi government military forces during a protest against the shah of Iran at Tehran University (Kandell, 1978: 18). On the same day one year later, a group of university students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 72 hostages. These students understood the media’s power to disseminate information, and they took full advantage of this to broadcast their activities to the world: they distributed photographs, held news conferences, and made the hostages they had taken visually available to the press surrounding the embassy (‘Iran leaders back embassy seizure’, New York Times, 6 November 1979). The proliferation of images of blindfolded hostages across the pages of US newspapers and the major television network broadcasts made it difficult then, as now, for American viewers to understand the complexity of the situation in Iran in late 1979 – a situation in which pro-revolutionary Iranian students took US embassy staff hostage as if to mark the anniversary of the shah’s attack on Iranian students. The specificity of the date of the seizure reveals how the students saw their act of hostage-taking as a response to a bitter history of US involvement in Iranian state affairs, including a CIA-backed coup ousting the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, in 1953.

The imagery of blindfolded hostages, which marked a lot of the press coverage at the time, has become visual shorthand for American interactions with modern Iran. The jacket of David Farber’s book, Taken Hostage (2005), uses such imagery to attract attention to his account of ‘the Iran hostage crisis and America’s first encounter with radical Islam’. But his book jacket draws on a readily available body of imagery that was commonly deployed at the moment of the embassy seizure, most visibly on ABC TV’s late-night news program The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. This program, anchored by Ted Koppel, debuted in November 1979 in order to report on events surrounding the hostage situation in Tehran (it became a permanent late-night broadcast renamed Nightline in March 1980). ² The show’s editors paired an image of a blindfolded hostage with a generic map of Iran, suggesting to viewers that the essential way to think about Iran was through the lens of the hostages – victims of a radicalized Iran (Figure 1). Such imagery made it hard for viewers to grasp the complexity of the relationship between Iran and the United States, a relationship that had been built upon a fraught and fragile foundation. The CIA had worked behind the scenes to overthrow Mosaddeq (the prime minister who had been working to nationalize Iranian oil) in 1953, and subsequently supported the shah as his repressive replacement. ³

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Figure 1

Still from ABC TV’s program ‘The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage’, c. 1979–1980.

Just as Nightline’s signature image of ‘the Iran Crisis’ emphasized the hostages as a way of understanding contemporary Iran, US newspapers and illustrated news magazines typically emphasized a limited repertoire of imagery about Iran in the wake of the embassy seizure. Editorial choices emphasized Iranian radicalism, cultural difference, and social unrest. In the pages of The New York Times, as well as Time and Life magazines, readers could consume images that now seem common tropes of so-called ‘radical Islam’: pictures of the furrowed brow of Ayatollah Khomeini, of unruly mobs burning the US flag or shouting ‘death to America’, which equated Iran with a murderous, irrational fury (Figure 2).

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Figure 2

Cover, Time magazine, 3 December 1979.

Gilles Peress, a French-born, New York based Magnum photographer, was working in Iran at the time that the hostages were taken. Over the course of about 6 weeks from December 1979 to January 1980, Peress shot photographs that he published in 1984 as a book entitled Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution. Comprising photographs taken in many locations and of diverse subjects, Peress’s book presents a picture of post-revolutionary Iran that differs in scope and kind from the photographs familiar to audiences in the United States and France, where the book was published in simultaneous editions. ⁴ Telex Iran activates a multivocal, non-linear visual account of the situation on the ground in Iran as Peress experienced it after the embassy was seized – an account that differs dramatically from the way US mainstream print media pictured those events. Peress’s approach emphasizes a more interactive, unstable representation of current events in Iran, in ways that seem primed to allow Euro-American viewers to learn about and ask questions of the complex political and economic realities of modern Iran and the legacy of its fraught relationship with the United States in the wake of the 1953 coup, the shah’s ascendance to power, and the US government’s support of the shah over the years.

The book begins with a page detailing a chronology of ‘events’ from 1919 to 1981, as if to educate readers about the history of modern Iran through some key events: the 1953 coup ousting Mosaddeq, the shah’s return to power in a US−led counter-coup, the shah’s 1979 departure to Egypt in the wake of popular protests, the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran from France, and the shah’s October 1979 arrival in New York City for medical treatment. Moving beyond this didactic content, however, the book’s layout, its limited use of text, and the diversity of images included frame current events in Iran as a loosely sequenced, layered set of images taken from multiple, visibly subjective viewpoints. The effect of this approach is essential to the book’s power: it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fabricate a single, totalizing understanding of the ‘truth’ of the situation at the time.

From the outset, Telex Iran is insistently multivocal, and self-aware, especially with regard to the photograph’s power within contemporary media culture. It begins with an image created by Peress that sets his project into a charged American media context rife with ominous, hyperbolic headlines demonizing Iran as a place of ‘shrieking’ masses in which American hostages were ‘flaunted’ as if to further humiliate a vulnerable America. Acknowledging that such anti-Iranian rhetoric permeated contemporary US media representations of Iran, Peress worked hard in Telex Iran to craft an overtly partial, multivocal representation of Iranian life in the postrevolutionary moment. Peress pictured fragments of the history behind, and the complex realities of, Iran’s revolution (and its aftermath in the hostage-taking) that captivated American audiences. By encouraging readers to see the media as a producer of the revolution’s history in the here and now, Peress cleverly activated his viewers’ critical awareness of their own complicity in, and roles as consumers of, such images within an orientalist visual culture. ⁵ Peress aimed to evade a brittle, totalizing approach to representing Iran. He created a project in Telex Iran that deployed a layered, non-linear visual structure in order to communicate something of the diversity of social and political circumstances, experiences, and positions that he experienced and recognized during his time on the ground in Iran. Such diversity of perspectives was typically invisible to American audiences at the time, largely in light of the ways that the mainstream US media tended to reproduce images depicting Iran as an increasingly radicalized, out-of-control, and terrifying Islamic state.

The Iranian students who took over the US Embassy played a role in this production of a polarized image culture by using photography and other electronic media to communicate their ideas to the world – including public viewing of the US hostages. They were savvy manipulators of the international media and relied on international journalists to photograph and record their activities and statements in order to get their message out to the world. They demanded publicly, for example, that the United States return the shah to Iran after he traveled to New York for medical treatment. They also displayed the hostages repeatedly to the press assembled outside the embassy – blindfolded and subdued by their captors – as a means of keeping their activities on the media’s radar. For many in the United States, these displays of the hostages in front of the assembled media constituted ‘blackmail’. ⁶

The Islamic Republic’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, on the other hand, likely understood that many Iranians – as well as Muslim audiences around the world – would recognize the shah as a proxy for US interests, and that the real problem was American imperialism in Iran and the Middle East. The CIA-backed coup against Mosaddeq and the CIA’s support for the shah and his secret police, the SAVAK (who were widely known for the extensive use of torture), were also rallying points in a number of public demonstrations across Iran at the time.

Against this backdrop of competing narratives about the hostages, and their relationship to a broader power struggle within Iran–US relations, Peress opens Telex Iran with a photograph that effectively highlights the media’s role in demonizing an entire nation and fueling anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States (Peress, 1997[1984]: 4–5). ‘Mideast Madness’, ‘Moslem Mobs Attack’, blare the tabloid headlines stacked up across this large, two-page spread. Peress objectifies such venomous press accounts, and simultaneously places himself within that context by making visible his own press ID card and the telexes he was sending back and forth to the Paris Magnum offices as he worked in Iran. Peress’s role in creating images that would define Iran is evident. We see his work in a contact sheet at right, and beneath that, a partially obscured but still legible list of some of his pictures’ subjects: ‘heroin smokers and cafes’; the ‘wounded’; ‘those tortured by the SAVAK’. Although apparently ambivalent about his role in creating a pictorial history of the post-revolutionary period, Peress actively engages us as viewers. He marks his own complicity in the production of images that are essential to defining the current conflict in Iran for audiences outside the country; at the same time, his list of subjects dramatizes his desire to show his viewers something more than the requisite images of hostages, angry mobs, and burning American flags.

Peress’s decision to open Telex Iran with this photograph reveals the book’s interest in how visual media, and photography especially, were active producers of knowledge about the country’s revolution both inside and outside Iran. The juxtaposition of tabloid headlines with descriptions of subjects that were not typically included in US media as an opening image in the book suggests that Telex Iran will offer a different narrative. The choice of this image for the book’s opening sets the reader up to engage with a more active, multivocal account of contemporary Iran – one that would frustrate attempts to find a single truth about the situation in the book’s pages. No single voice would or could emerge from Peress’s account. Such singularity would be denied through the juxtaposition, variation, and non-linearity that unfold across the book’s pages, a book that refuses the iconicity familiar to readers of brittle propaganda. Peress disregards chronology and marshals vivid, competing, and visually complex and competing points of view in order to grasp viewers’ attention and unsettle them. His Iran is neither ideologically consistent nor centralized; rather, Peress’s Iran reveals itself as a jumbled admixture, a conglomerate, a panorama of different places, people, and points of view. Telex Iran pushes its readers to recognize that the Iranian revolution was something experienced and understood differentially across diverse social, political, and institutional groups inside and outside of Iran. Throughout, however, there is a clear choice made by Peress to hint at a collective desire for decolonization on the part of Iranians in the wake of the shah’s US−backed oppression and final exile.

Although Peress begins his book with American tabloid journalism, he also includes several photographs focused on Iranian media, reminding readers of the competition for producing images of the revolution. One photograph captures a still from Iranian TV aimed at teaching people how to take hostages (pp. 20–21). The photographic frame – a television screen in actuality – is filled by the face of a man with a rough, possibly wooden gag thrust into his mouth, its ends revealing black loops of cord by which the gag has been attached to his head, wrapping beneath his ears and neck and back around his head. One notices military-esque regalia affixed to his shoulders, suggesting a reversal of power in the way that the prisoner’s body is identified, alluding perhaps to the revolutionary upending of the shah’s regime, as well as to the students’ own hostage-taking at the US Embassy. A telex addressed to Magnum Paris printed at lower left enunciates the varied meanings a viewer might glean from the image in the heat of the moment. The telex printed on the bottom of the page functions as a caption for the photograph, one of the few allowed to shape the reader’s experience of Telex Iran: ‘PHOTO 9 SHOWING TV PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH GAG IN MOUTH THE CAPTION IS INCORRECT STOP IT IS A PHOTO OF A TRAINING SESSION ON IRANIAN TV TO TEACH HOW TO CAPTURE PRISONERS ET HOSTAGES STOP IT IS NOT A SCENE FROM THE US EMBASSY. PLEASE CORRECT YOUR CAPTION’ (p. 20). Media images like this one are revealed through the linkage between grainy TV image and abrupt telex language as constantly in the process of being created by the viewer. The origin of this image, its purpose, and its meaning were, as the telex suggests, quite literally tied to the context of one’s viewing: one’s knowledge of the situation depicted, as well as one’s social or political position relative to both the image’s visual content and the imagined viewers – viewers whose own positions would be inflected by their physical and psychological viewing experiences, whether on television or in the pages of a newspaper, book, or magazine.

A second photograph depicts a group of men harnessing the power of the media by taking over a television station in the northwestern city of Tabriz. Tabriz had been at the center of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911; it was associated with the Marxist Tudeh party in the years after World War II; and most importantly in terms of this image, it was the birthplace of Ayatollah Mohammed Kazem Shari’atmadari, the important liberal cleric who was the most outspoken and prominent rival to Ayatollah Khomeini at the time that Peress took this picture (pp. 18−19). ⁷ Indeed, the rivalry between the two heated up on 26 November 1979, when Shari’atmadari vocally denounced the seizure of the US Embassy and the taking of hostages (Nikazmerad, 1980: 365). Shari’atmadari was reported to have described the seizure as an ‘un-Islamic action’ (Menashri, 1980: 135). And in the wake of the increasingly visible rivalry between the two ayatollahs, and an attack on Shari’atmadari’s home in Qom, violent demonstrations against Khomeini took place in late 1979 and early 1980 across Iranian Azerbaijan and its capital, Tabriz. On 6 December 1979, Shari’atmadari’s supporters seized the Tabriz radio and television station and sent out messages that ‘proclaimed Shari’atmadari to be the leader of all the world’s Shi’ite Muslims’ (Nikazmerad, 1980: 366). ⁸ In the days that followed, the supporters of both Khomeini and Shari’atmadari fought for control of the radio and television stations in Tabriz – and it is this internal political conflict that Peress’s photograph speaks to. Framed from below, the photograph turns on an opposition between two male figures. At the lower left edge, a small half-figure appears carrying a gun. Standing on top of the concrete wall that cuts across the center of the image is another half-man, but instead of a gun he carries two images of important revolutionary protagonists: Shari’atmadari is depicted in portrait format in the image above, and Khomeini is shown in a full-length pose, with his hand raised. The implied physical distance between the man with the gun and the man with the posters not only encourages the viewer to experience the image spatially, but it also mobilizes that spatial effect in order to place us, as viewers, within a mobile, disjointed place where size, scale, location, and meaning are elusive. What is clear is the opposition between guns and images made manifest by the men who hold those things. But that is about all that is clear in the photograph. Spatial and conceptual clarity are hard to come by since one man is tiny and the other much larger; this is likely the effect of actual physical distance, but the dominating white sky of the background and the angle of Peress’s camera view thwart our ability to make sense of the men’s location in a grounded, coherent space. The men appear to float, uncertain as to their positions in the world.

The two portraits held aloft by the man in the foreground further confuse our sense of the image’s meaning, since they represent the two most important revolutionary figures of the time: Shari’atmadari and Khomeini − Shari’atmadari above in a bust-length, intimate portrait, Khomeini below in a full-length, iconic pose with raised hand. With the images literally paired and contrasted in this way, Peress’s photograph captures the texture of a revolution in process here in Tabriz: inside Iran and across the globe this unfinished revolution is playing out on radio stations, in TV broadcasts, and in the pages of Telex Iran. By including these diverse examples of photographs emphasizing the media’s role in the revolution, Peress activates an understanding on the part of his viewer of the media’s critical role in creating and framing the revolution for audiences inside and outside Iran.

A very different example of how the broadcast media impacted global understanding of the situation in Iran is a photograph that Peress included at the very end of Telex Iran: a two-page spread revealing the strange irony of the US media context and its narrowed capacity for framing the events in Iran in ways that could echo the more unfinished approach of the image of the Tabriz TV station (Peress, 1997[1984]: 98). On the left, we see a still from ABC television: it is day 101 of The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. At right, Peress depicts a still from an oven-cleaner commercial that appears to have followed on the heels of the Nightline broadcast. A white housewife grimaces at a pie that has exploded inside her oven. The culinary accident demands a quick clean-up – as if to reinforce the need to fix the messy situation we’ve left behind in Iran for this commercial break. Whereas the Tabriz image highlights the competition of ideas, factions, and points of view in a fractured Iran, the ABC image crystallizes a narrower, singular perspective on the situation, revolving as ever around the embassy hostages and US victimization. A final layer articulates the media’s role in producing the news, as the pair of TV stills are themselves embedded in Peress’s film-photography practice. The film stock’s visible frame numbers surround the TV stills, accentuating how photographs are produced through acts of vision and selection.

This contrast between the ‘Iran crisis’ and a messy oven would have been experienced by US viewers within a polarized, strident media landscape. For example, on 10 November 1979 (6 days after the seizure of the US Embassy) The New York Times published a pair of images that boiled the situation in Iran down to a war between America and Iran – rather than the symptom of a broader geopolitical history of US–Iranian relations, including the US backing of the recently deposed shah. Paired to illustrate a story about recent events in Iran, one photograph depicts demonstrators carrying US flags and signs demanding that ‘Camel Jockeys go home’, while the other depicts Iranian demonstrators showing their support for the Ayatollah Khomeini outside the US Embassy in Tehran, asking, ‘Imam: What do we need relations with America for?’ The Times’ headline accentuates the threat to the United States only implied by the paired photos. It reads: ‘In Tehran, Prayers and Death Chants’, and the story’s first sentence informs readers that ‘on one of the holiest days of the Shiite Muslim calendar, thousands of Iranians knelt in prayer here today and then streamed to the American Embassy to chant: “Death to the Americans!”’ (see Kifner, 1979: 1).

Peress’s imagery avoids such oppositional rhetoric, as we have already seen, and several of his photographs aim to reveal the possible causes of anti-American sentiment in Iran. In one picture near the beginning of Telex Iran, Peress draws his viewer into an active engagement with the roots of the hostage-taking by locating his camera eye over the shoulder of a woman who is herself looking at an ad hoc public archive set up just outside the US Embassy in Tehran (Peress, 1997[1984]: 11). Affixed to a whiteboard are a number of index cards with small portrait photos and text, all of which are accompanied by a hand-written message in English identifying the individuals depicted on the cards as ‘victims of the Shah and America’. Hand-drawn arrows connect the message about such victims and the photographic archive, as does the image that appears on the page beneath it, representing two men asleep on the ground. Their prostrate bodies reinforce the idea of submission announced in the text visible above, and the tattered foam mats they lie on make their poverty plain. Taken together, the two images do more than acknowledge Iranian suffering, however: they take us close to that suffering. We look over a woman’s shoulder, scanning the makeshift archive of SAVAK victims. Yet we are also complicit with such victimization as we look down on the two men asleep beneath her. Their vulnerability and submission to our gaze, and the photograph’s visualization of a spatially experienced sense of power, pushes us to think about bodies prostrate and vulnerable, and may implicate us as enablers of such a power dynamic.

Peress places other photographs of SAVAK victims and perpetrators later in the book. Through repetition, and subtle transformations across the images, we recall the earlier images and recognize that this archive of the SAVAK missing and dead is growing. In one group of images taken outside the embassy, we notice that the earlier portrait photographs have now migrated to trees in the vicinity (pp. 86–87). On the left side of the image on the upper right of the photo spread, a small printed map of Iran depicts three turbaned men strangling a diminutive Uncle Sam. Beneath this is a picture of a cemetery whose tombstones cast deep, patterned shadows over barren earth. A funeral procession floats across the left-hand page. Sequenced and organized in this way, the three images build upon the ideas created by the earlier juxtaposition of images related to the SAVAK victims and the sleeping pair of men. Through this subtle repetition of themes and layering of visual experience, Peress hints that the number of victims is growing, and that the bodies we once thought were just sleeping, might now be dead.

Other images in the book, nearby, reinforce this thread within Telex Iran between the brutality of the SAVAK and Iranian dead: in one case, Peress has juxtaposed photographs of a funeral in Qom at top, with images of men whose bodies bear the signs of mutilation at the hands of the SAVAK, in Tehran (p. 45). The funeral unfolds in a progression, with hands carrying a coffin in a cortège, juxtaposed with the image below of a man’s armless torso. Several additional images connect SAVAK victims, survivors, and perpetrators; Peress pushes readers to move across the book’s pages in a pattern of layering and repetition that reinforces the reality of the shah’s oppression of his people and showcases this oppression as a central motif within the drive to cultural and political revolution. One such image depicts nervous SAVAK agents in the process of being interrogated at Evin prison in Tehran (pp. 72–73). The agents sit in front of a wall covered with photographic portraits of their victims, as if their victims have now become witnesses to their tormentors’ own demise. Once again, the archive of the disappeared is conjured in our minds from earlier in the book, yet this time we see the agents of that work placed under the pressure of a revolutionary interrogation.

A second thread that Peress weaves throughout the book focuses on poverty and drug addiction (primarily in Tehran), a reflection of the shah’s disastrous economic policies. Heroin smokers appear several times in the book, and in one case we are thrust directly into the space of the heroin smokers by Peress’s camera, feeling ourselves so close to the action that it seems as if we might bump into them (pp. 42–43). Social dislocation and addiction were part and parcel of the poverty produced by a shah who spent vast sums on US military hardware rather than his people – and, as such, Peress offers another point of view onto the social and political forces that were likely catalysts for the Iranian revolution.

Turning the book’s pages, we understand that the revolution was neither monolithic nor complete when Peress was in Iran. His photographs illustrate that the revolution was an active, contested process. We see a thriving arms market in Kurdistan, where men crowd around us, guns akimbo, ready to ply their wares; across the page is a close-up of a collection of commemorative plates decorated with the faces of the Ayatollah Khomeini, among others (pp. 80–81). Or we find ourselves in a room with a group of clerics, looking over the shoulder of one directly in front of us, facing others who are in active conversation, smoking, and presenting their grievances about the revolutionary government in Azerbaijan (pp. 78–79). Images like these emphasize the instability of what many Americans had come to understand as a unified political–religious regime. Instead of seeing an iron-fisted Khomeini, or conflict between him and Shari’atmadari, we are intimate observer–participants at an instance of negotiation and exchange.

Through Peress’s emphasis on media imagery, his effort to teach his readers about Iranian suffering under the SAVAK, and his attempt to show us the revolution as a work in progress, Telex Iran should be understood as a significant photographic achievement of the later 20th century, in which one of the most complex and contentious sociopolitical events in the history of Iran–US relations was redefined in ways that undermined one’s ability to view those events as disconnected from a broader history, from one’s specific geographic or political perspective, from subjectivity. Telex Iran intermittently undermines the binary structure of the typical rhetoric upon which the central actors and media in both Iran and the United States depended in order to create their ideological agendas.

As Peress worked in Iran during the weeks after the hostage-taking, he made photographs that turned into a book with a mission: to expose, and critique, the concept of unified narrative closure around the Iranian revolution and the hostage-taking in its aftermath that so riveted the world in late 1979 and 1980. When the book was published in 1984, the editors presciently included a provocative set of questions aimed at pushing readers to consider Peress’s photographic project in Iran as a catalyst for not only rethinking their understanding of contemporary Iran and its modern history, but also their own roles as viewers in New York, Paris, or Los Angeles. The project prompts readers to reevaluate how they think about Iran, and to recognize their contributions to the image of Iran as radical, foreign, and distant rather than the product of their own consumption and understanding. On the one hand, the editors of the Aperture edition of Telex Iran ask us to consider photographs themselves as objects that lose their ‘original symbolic meaning … by virtue of the distance they have traveled’, and to understand photographs therefore as ‘documents of another kind plotting … the simplifications, the distortions, the banality, the incomprehension, the venality of the process of collecting and diffusing information’. But the editors also ask several important questions – questions that Peress’s work catalyzes through his persistent, rigorous approach to making photographs and his interest in assembling them into an overall structure that resists singularity of voice and conceptual unity in favor of multivocality and layered multiplicity of meaning. Telex Iran acts upon us by prodding us, visually and conceptually, to reimagine ways of seeing and thinking about how we experience and consume the world through the images we see and remember.

Peress’s editors were right in claiming that his images ‘open a window on our understanding of Iran’ and that those images ‘suggest … the distance between presumption (the common ground of the media) and true perception’. By ‘true perception’, I do not think his editors meant a singular ‘truth’ of perception that the photographs locked down and then organized into neat and tidy boxes; rather, it is a mode of perception that both acknowledges and dramatizes, visually, the impossibility of a singular point of view onto history. No matter how far we are from Iran of 1979−1980, the editors’ questions remain worth consideration:

What was Iran? What was its message that remains, today, so deeply disturbing? If we did not discover who the Iranians are, have we at least begun to comprehend who we are? Can we, as a society, yet accept that the Iranians had been through their own holocaust, and our complicity in their suffering? Today, we continue to insist on power on our own terms, not recognizing that the support we lend to repressive regimes will, in the end, given the historical inevitability of revolution against tyranny, bring us down both morally and politically. Look back. The memory of Iran is with us still. It is far, far away, but close. Iran. (Introduction: Peress, 1997[1984]: 3)

Prescient words, these are, from the position of 2015, a time when Iran is once again a regular fixture of the daily news cycle – although the focus in the United States has now shifted to nuclear inspections and economic sanctions rather than the status of US hostages. We should recognize, however, that our ideas about Iran today are tied directly to the narratives about Iran that were created back in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the wake of the revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic. The American news media echo and rely upon their audience’s collective memory of those earlier narratives as the ‘context’ through which readers understand today’s Iran – an Iran led by President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As Barbie Zelizer (1998: 3) reminds us:

Collective memories allow for the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often pushing aside accuracy and authenticity so as to accommodate broader issues of identity formation, power and authority, and political affiliation. Memories in this view become not only the simple act of recall, but social, cultural, and political action at its broadest level.

I take Zelizer’s point to heart as I consider the significance of Peress’s Telex Iran. Collective memory operates partially, in fragments, and depends on the mixing of old image-memories with new ones; as such, the active resistance to singularity embodied by Peress’s Telex Iran offers a point of departure for the creation of a new set of collective memories about Iran − memories that might be productively recreated, and reoriented so that we might find ways to see the past again in the present, by looking at his work anew. ⁹ If we can learn to see the past we have forgotten or never knew, as if for the first time, through Peress’s camera and his embodied engagement with Iran, we might find ourselves more likely to refuse the polarity of contemporary cultural and political discourse today.