HYDERABAD: During the Taliban regime, it was unsafe for journalists to work in Afghanistan. The situation became more dangerous when Zakia Zaki, journalist and director of Peace Radio was killed in 2007 in front of her children. Her cold-blooded murder was a warning to other female journalists not to come ahead and join media. “But the very next day 300 women came forward to apply for the position as our NGO was involved,” says photojournalist Reza Deghati who has been in the troubled country more than 100 times since the invasion of the Soviet troops. Through his NGO Aina (Persian for mirror), he has done much humanitarian works to empower the Afghani women. The ace photographer was in the city for the ongoing Indian Photography
Festival.
He wanted to help the Afghan media destroyed by the brutal Taliban rule, that’s how he started doing training programmes for Afghans to help them learn photography, design and more. He also did it to help them start their own TV channels, magazines and newspapers. He focussed on women in media whose strength always threatened the arbitrary rule. “The situation of women is difficult in many countries. It’s only when you see their resilience that you realise how strong they are,” says Reza talking about the photo-stories and documentaries he has done over there. The image of a little Afghan girl sitting amid the rubble of her village burnt and plundered still haunts him.
“She sat there thinking like a 60-year-old. I can never forget that look as I clicked her photograph,” reminisces the photographer who himself was caught and jailed in Iran, the country of his birth, for clicking photographs that told the truth of the autocratic rule of the Shah of Iran. He would go ahead and paste them on walls. No wonder he was arrested and tortured while he was still studying in Tehran University. After the revolution he went to Paris and settled down there working for one of the top news agencies of the world. He shares, “When Islamic Republic took over Iran, they showed that they were anti-democratic and anti-human. They somehow restricted me and others from doing work, that’s why I left and have been in self-exile for the past 40 years.” He doesn’t regret saying that ‘it has brought him closer to more humans’.
It’s not just the work that he’s done in Afghanistan and his own country, his photography project ‘Portrait of Rwanda’s Lost Children’ helped 4,500 children unite with their parents/relatives. He was asked by UNICEF and Red Cross Society to work on this, as many people had fled Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. “I was asked to do 12,000 portraits. I trained some refugees in one day who also clicked the portraits,” says the 65-year-old master photographer. Talking about refugees, he takes a different approach on the ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas in Myanmar, “This has made our work more difficult. But we won’t stop. We will go on doing it.”
So what is it other than passion that keeps a photographer going despite all the challenges? “The power to connect, to tell tales. To understand that heart more than the art is the solution for all the wars.” That’s how he narrates the tale of a young boy saving a plant from a bombed site. “The child wanted to see it grow in a tree. Life needs to be saved from any war,” says he.
Reza has penned 27 books and believes in ‘one tribe, one world’, but how does he see his vision materialising. “It’s through words and photographs you establish one-to-one connection with the emotions. I grew up in a country where poetry is the main art. For me, images are visual poetry powerful enough to change the whole world,” he signs off.