The Imagery of an Uprising

The big global news story (and rightly so) these past few days has been the alleged fraudulent reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against reformist opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. This fairly apparent stolen election has caused supporters of Mousavi to take to the streets in numbers unseen in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The government's reaction to this populist movement was brutal and they soon decided to disband any foreign reporting in the country to try to contain some really bad PR the incumbent administration's harsh fists are collecting all around the world. This is on top of negative attention already gathered by Ahmadinejad's resolute stance on having a nuclear-armed Iran. The future of the country and the choices and actions yet to be made by everyone from the president, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and those rallying on the street presents a historic tale of a disenfranchised public creating an overnight uprising against a government clinging to what little power they still have over the country's people. Such a climactic event should be well documented and exposed to the eyes and hearts of the rest of the world, and the choice to censor foreign and local reports has caused an even stronger uproar among the masses.

Human ingenuity, especially in the face of government crackdowns, provides our present day societies with surplus ways to communicate with others around the world, almost instantaneously. Against the fear of consequences of a vengeful ruling dictatorship, some Iranians (including many Iranian students) have gotten their stories told through hidden internet proxies and websites such as Twitter and Youtube. But some of the best ways to document and understand a historic moment in time is a technique that has been in practice for almost 200 years: photographic journalism. And although even that is being censored in Iran, we in the western world are able to see visually the events taking place in an emotional and profound way, simply by the capture of a singular moment in time. I've decided to link several of the best photojournalism resources out there about this explosive current event:

Boston Globe's Big Picture - Iran's Disputed Election, Iran's Continued Election Turmoil







NY Times Lens (Visual Journalism) - Dateline: Iran
(images below were taken by award-winning photojournalist Olivier Laban-Mattei)









For continued live coverage of the situation in Iran, check out these live-blogging sites:
HuffPost's Live-Blogging the Uprising
NY Times' Lede Blog - Latest Updates on Iran's Disputed Election
CNN's iReport - Following the Iran Election


Peace,
Drew