Iran's Joan of Arc: dying seconds that last for ever

An undated picture posted on the internet on June 23
shows Iranian Neda Agha Soltan,
who was reportedly killed when hit by a bullet
during a protest in Tehran.

(SMH) - An undated picture posted on the internet on June 23 which purports to show Iranian Neda Agha Soltan, who was reportedly killed when hit by a bullet during a protest in Tehran. Photo: AFP
Cassandra Jardine

The death of a young woman on the streets of Tehran is caught on camera and viewed by millions. But should we be watching?

You tick the box saying you are over 18. You notice the warning that the material you are about to see could be upsetting. But nothing can prepare you for the horrible immediacy of watching a young woman die, as Neda Soltan does on YouTube.

The instant the "Play" button is pressed you are pitched into the streets of Tehran, where a woman in jeans is lying on the ground while several men attempt to help her. As the camera moves around the scene, away from her legs, past the striped T-shirt of a helper, we see the face of the 27-year-old philosophy student. She is young and beautiful, but it is her eyes that are unforgettable. They stare at you with a look of animal panic, as the first blood begins to trickle out of her mouth.

The film lasts only 40 seconds, but it is enough to affect world opinion. Over the past few days millions of people have sent links to each other, wanting to share the horror that brings home so vividly the violence which the Iranian authorities are meting out on innocent citizens.

In years to come, the bloodied face of Neda - already called the Angel of Freedom - will be the image that lingers of the Iran uprising, just as the naked, napalmed girl running down the road has come to encapsulate the Vietnam war.

Neda never set out to be a martyr: her boyfriend Caspian Makan, has said that she was with her music teacher when she briefly stepped out of the car, only to become caught up in history. Yet she is already on her way to becoming Iran's Joan of Arc, its answer to Jan Palach.

The blackened face of Palach, the student who set fire to himself in 1969, has become the lasting image of the Czech fight against Soviet repression.

Palach knew what he was dying for, but any meaning attached to Neda's death has been projected on to her by those looking for a symbol, a poster girl for the opposition.

No one knows her views on freedom.

All we really know of her is that pale face covered in blood.

These images, as the great war photographer Don McCullin has said, are our modern version of religious icons, with the eyes of the victim invariably looking heavenwards for deliverance as martyrs did in old master paintings.

A painting does not purport to represent reality; photographs and films do, but they can almost as easily be manipulated.

Already comparisons have already been drawn between the wide circulation of the footage of her death and the attention drawn by the Palestinians to the "Zionist regime's brutality" by continually replaying footage of a 12-year-old boy supposedly shot dead next to his father in Gaza in 2000. A court case eventually showed this to be faked.

Faking is as old as photography itself. In the First World War, faked pictures - fauxtographs - were circulated of the Kaiser cutting the hands off babies.

Interest groups have always used anything that touches the emotions as propaganda. Arousing outrage is, after all, the point of it.

Furious arguments raged in the blogosphere in 2006 over pictures of a dead child being carried from the rubble of an Israeli attack in southern Lebanon: sharp-eyed critics noticed the same man repeatedly carrying a child's body towards the cameras and replaying his moments of anguish for maximum impact.

The temptation to create iconic material is immense.

The key image of the Spanish Civil War is Robert Capa's photograph of The Fallen Soldier, his body arched from the impact of a shot. A witness has now claimed it was almost certainly faked.

Only two years ago, a Reuters photographer was sacked for adding smoke to increase the drama of his pictures of the bombing of Lebanon.

"There have been all kinds of problems with the doctoring of photographs," says Stuart Franklin, president of Magnum, a co-operative that represents many war photographers, and of which Capa was a founding member.

"We have to be very cautious and look for several sources of evidence - and witnesses. You can't assume something will be false, but you have to verify."

The footage of Neda Soltan's death certainly has the ring of truth about it: the panicky voices, the blood that spread with shocking speed over her face (as it would since she had been shot in the heart) and the testimonials of relatives.

This looks like an image that we can trust. But should we be looking at it at all?

Generally, the British media steer clear of such shocking images because they contravene one of our last taboos: that the moment of death is private and should be witnessed only by those who care for that person.

In the YouTube age, that principle is being eroded. Anyone in the office can now glance the "most viewed" list on YouTube, and observe a quick death between a rerun of Susan Boyle's early triumph and Sunday's episode of Top Gear.

There was an outcry last year when Craig Ewart, a 59-year-old suffering from motor neurone disease, allowed his Dignitas-assisted death in Switzerland to be filmed. Watching him sipping through a straw the drink that would send him into his final coma was as shocking as watching Ms Soltan's life leaking away on a Tehran pavement, but at least he chose to be filmed in this way.

And yet, Franklin believes, "there is a difference between Neda's death and voyeurism. It's about drawing attention to an issue."

The frontier between the two is a personal matter. Most people would feel repugnance at the idea of paying to view (as you can) the beheading of the kidnapped US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. That footage passes the reality test, but perhaps fails the distaste test because it was a deliberate murder, not news captured spontaneously.

Yet during the bombing of Gaza this winter, many people chose to watch Al-Jazeera rather than the UK television channels because the footage was more graphic.

What will be the image by which the Iraq war is remembered in years to come? Probably the humiliation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, inexpertly filmed by a soldier. Had good taste prevailed we would not have had the evidence.

Photographer Marcus Bleasdale, who has covered conflicts in Congo, Sudan and Somalia, has his own moral code.

"Since Capa's day in the 1930s, the professional rule is that you can crop a photograph, but you cannot remove or insert. As for whether you should show the moment of death, if I am the only witness to a scene I would put down my camera and try to save that person's life. If there are others better able to help, it is my job to record reality."

Images force change, Stuart Franklin believes.

"I was in Tiananmen in 1989, when gory photographs of students were being glued to lamp posts. It was the only way people could see what was going on. The photographs taken at the Heysel stadium [where 39 football supporters died in 1985] focused attention on inadequate design and police practice." As did the unforgettable pictures of people crushed to death against the wire at Hillsborough in 1989, when 96 people died.

At the time there were protests about their publication. Upsetting as the results may be, the alternative is worse.

Many appalling atrocities of recent years have passed relatively unnoticed because there are no images to which the public can attach their outrage.

Repression in Burma and Tibet has been helped by the lack of reporting and filming. And who remembers the deaths of rioting Mexican students before the 1968 Olympics? Few, because no images exist.

Neda Soltan's death draws attention to the disproportionate use of force used to quell rioters.

One day she may, like Jan Palach, have a memorial raised to her and a square named after her.

What her fate does not do is shed any light on the nuances of the conflict. For that, words and thought are more reliable than pictures and emotion.

London Telegraph