Abbas
Photographer who chronicled the Iranian revolution and studied the impact of religion on society
ABBAS, who has died aged 74, was a photojournalist who spent a large part of his career documenting the upheavals of countries in conflict, before turning his attention in later years to the impact of religion on society.
His work in the world’s conflict zones began at the end of the 1960s in Nigeria during the Biafran war, and he went on to document Iran’s Islamic revolution, Bangladesh’s bitter battle for independence, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and South Africa during apartheid.
“When I photograph people, I’m not interested in the person but what they represent,” he said, but his words were belied by the humanity that shone through his work. In 1979 he photographed a woman accused of supporting the Shah being dragged by a mob through the streets of Tehran. It was a stark microcosm of the Islamic revolution, but its power comes from the faces, the woman’s look of resignation to her fate making a brutal contrast with the fury of her captors.
The photograph also prefigured Abbas’s preoccupation of later years – as he put it, “What people do in the name of God.”
Abbas Attar, known professionally by his first name, was born in March 1944 in Iran, but moved to Algeria with his family when he was eight, as the Algerian struggle for independence from France was building momentum. “Seeing history made before my eyes” made him want to be a journalist.
At 18 he became sports editor of his local paper, Le Peuple, but he decided that photography was his calling, and he was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee to spend a year in Mexico for the 1968 Olympic Games: “One day I’d be doing sports, the following day I’d have to photograph an orchestra or some African statues.”
His first work in a conflict zone was in Nigeria, photographing the Biafran War, and he then spent several years working for the pan-african magazine Jeune Afrique. But he felt a strong pull to investigate life in the country of his birth. In 1971 he joined the Sipa agency, and throughout the ensuing decade he visited Iran repeatedly, fascinated by its contradictions – a forward-looking country, but one still riven with the forces of tradition.
There were more light-hearted assignments along the way. He photographed Muhammad Ali in the run-up to the “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. “He was like a film director and we were working for him,” Abbas recalled.
He began recording the Islamic revolution in the late 1970s because he had the feeling that the revolution was being stolen from the people, an idea reflected in the title of his first book, Iran: La Révolution Confisquée (1980).
The anger the book aroused drove him into an exile from his homeland lasting 17 years. Iran Diary 1971-2002 took a fresh look at the country’s recent history.
After leaving Sipa in 1974 for the Gamma agency, in 1981 he joined Magnum, and for the rest of his life was based in Paris. Between 1983 and 1986 he travelled through Mexico, resulting in the book Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992).
His work in Iran had planted the seeds of his later preoccupation with the religious impulse, and beginning in 1987 he studied the rise of Islamism, publishing Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam in 1994. He investigated religious subgroups such as Muslims in China and Jews in Ethiopia, and wanted to understand why people believe in God. “I don’t think God created man,” he insisted. “I think man created God.”
After the terrorist attacks of September 2001 he turned his attention once more to Islam, resulting in his 2009 book In Whose Name? The Islamic World After 9/11. He also investigated the Buddhist world, before turning his attention to Hinduism. His last project was on Judaism. “My relationship with God is professional,” he said. “He doesn’t tell me what to do and I don’t tell him what to do.”
Abbas, who is survived by four sons, was a private man, who would often cover his face when he was being photographed.
Abbas, born March 1944, died April 25 2018