A THOUSAND WORDS; Dept. of Belated Thanks

Ben McGrath
June 4, 2007
The New Yorker

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, keeps four prize-winning photographs on the wall above his desk. One is of Babe Ruth’s farewell, at Yankee Stadium; another shows Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower walking together at Camp David; a third depicts the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima; and the last, taken in 1979, shows the execution of eleven men by a firing squad, at close range–an iconic distillation of the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. “It haunted me as I sat there at my desk day after day,” Gissler said recently of the image. For twenty-seven years, the photographer’s identity was unknown; the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at, when it published the image, withheld attribution out of concern for his safety. The shot remains the only anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer in the ninety-year history of the prizes.

The photographer’s name, we now know, is Jahangir Razmi. His identity was uncovered last December, with his permission, by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Joshua Prager, and the Pulitzer board decided to credit Razmi formally at its awards ceremony, last week, with a ten-thousand-dollar prize. For the occasion, Razmi, who is fifty-nine, and his wife, Parvin, made their first trip to the United States. After landing at J.F.K., they visited the United Nations and the Brooklyn Bridge, window-shopped on Fifth Avenue, and stopped at the Chase branch on Broadway at 109th Street to cash their winnings, posing for pictures with the chief teller. (The United States and Iran do not share banking relations, so cashing the check in Tehran might have been complicated.) After a while, Parvin asked, “Where’s all the fruit in this country?” They added Fairway to their itinerary.

On the eve of the Pulitzer ceremony, Prager organized a dinner party in the Razmis’ honor, at the penthouse apartment of a friend, the philanthropist Greg Carr. There Razmi met Monir Nahid, a Kurdish woman whose two sons were among the eleven victims Razmi documented, and who in the aftermath of the shootings had used the photograph to rally for an independent Kurdistan, before escaping to Germany, in the fall of 1979. (She now lives in Los Angeles.) Razmi and Nahid embraced and, talking through tears, expressed relief at having finally had a chance to meet. “We never hide behind clouds,” Razmi said, in Farsi. “In the end, all will be revealed.”

Soon afterward, Sharok Hatami, whom Prager calls “the forefather of Iranian photojournalism,” arrived. Hatami lives in New York and has not been to Iran since 1983. He was dressed in cargo pants, sandals, and a baseball cap, and seemed to embody the road not taken for Razmi, who opened a studio in Tehran after tiring of newspaper work. (Razmi has photographed every Iranian President except Ahmadinejad.) Hatami introduced himself as a close personal friend of Coco Chanel and Sharon Tate. “You can Google me,” he said. (The first listing is from CharlieManson.com: “Sharok Hatami was the photographer at Sharon’s house when Manson dropped by a few months before the murders.”) He picked up a glass of kosher Chardonnay. “I’m finishing my first wine and looking forward to my second,” he said, and wandered off with his camera to snap pictures of the Flatiron Building.

Over dinner, Prager pointed out that Razmi had lost the hearing in his right ear from a mortar explosion. Razmi gave the date of his injury using the Iranian calendar, and Maryam Rassapour, a former neighbor in Tehran who had taken the bus up that morning from Washington, converted it for the benefit of the Western guests: 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War. For dessert, a rice-berry-and-mango pudding was served, and Rassapour expressed surprise. “We serve it with hot chicken in Iran,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite foods. All of a sudden it comes with mango?”

Original compositions by Razmi’s son Ali, a professional player of the tar, a type of Iranian lute, were piped in as coffee was served. At last, Razmi rose to speak. “I’m now returning to a country in which bad things are happening, and I hope I can act as a responsible journalist in bringing truth to the people,” he said, through an interpreter. “The prize that I’m getting tomorrow is for being patient and for waiting such a long time.”