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Treatment of JournalistsAN ESSAY IN WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHSPeering Inside Contemporary IranBY IASON ATHANASIADISA little girl looks out from a crowd of chador-covered women during a fireritual that tens of thousands of women perform on the eve of the Shi’itefestival of Ashura in the town of Khorramabad in western Iran. Ashurais part of mainstream Shi’ite Islam but, similar to Sufism, certain of itsrituals approach a mystic plateau that has led orthodox Muslim scholarsto condemn them.An exhibit of photographs of Iran featuringthe work of Iason Athanasiadis,a 2008 Nieman Fellow, opened for athree-month show in January at theCraft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM)in Los Angeles, California. “Exploringthe Other: Contemporary Iran,”the title Athanasiadis selected for hiscollection, became the first exhibit ofpolitical photography from Iran to beshown at an American museum sincethe 1979 Islamic Revolution. NowAthanasiadis is contributing some ofthe exhibit’s photographs, along withothers he took during the years whenhe lived and worked in Iran, to thepages of Nieman Reports. His wordsthat accompany these photographswere written for CAFAM’s newsletterto introduce his show and explain howa photojournalist created an “artisticmuseum show about Iran.” On the followingpage, this introduction appearsin a reworked version.Nieman Reports | Summer 2009 9