“Suddenly I see the crowds and I’m getting very excited. Then I see a body; a burned body being carried out on [the] shoulders. I remember. It was so quick. I was on a platform. I raised my camera and it was a blank shot. I just took it there. Few shots, and the body goes away.” These are the words of the Iranian photographer, Abbas Attar, describing his extraordinarily haunting shot captured in central Tehran on 29 January 1979, only a few days before the fall of the Shah. Earlier that day, the fervent revolutionaries had burned down Tehran’s red-light district. The burned body floating over the shoulders, belonged to a prostitute who lived in there. The capture seems metaphorically surreal. A burned female body on top, a sea of ferocious male faces beneath celebrating their landmark triumph; the saint(s) and the whore in one remarkable frame!
After the Islamic Revolution, the brothel was razed to the ground. Madams were executed and inhabitants were displaced. The city literally removed her notorious offspring wiping it off the map and subsequently built a park on its ruins. The district was called Shar-e No (New City). In the late Qajar era, it was an outer city housework district not too far from one of the city’s gates called Darvezeh Ghazvin. In the Pahlavi era, it was merged in, and became the most infamous part of the town; a neglected, run-down quarter depicting a sorrowful image the state didn’t want to be seen. Two months after the US-British-backed coup of 1953, Fazlollah Zahedi, the Shah’s prime minister ordered a wall to be built around the district. A walled city with an iron gate was born before the public eye. This essay is telling the story of this quarter. The piece, critically challenging the both pre- and post-revolutionary approaches toward the district, will uncover its historical, socio-political, as well as physical transformations through (re)visiting the few existing works of art and literature by those who dug the neighbourhood between 1950s and 70s; namely Zakaria Hashemi’s novel Tuti (1970), Mahmoud Zand Moghaddam’s narratives Shahr-e No (2013, first published in 1957); a 1969 report ‘on prostitution in the city of Tehran’ initiated by the Tehran’s School of Social Work; Kaveh Golestan’s Prostitute Series (1975-7) and a 1966 documentary, Women’s Quarter (Qaleh) by Kamran Shirdel.
