Photographs that shook the world: firing squad in Iran

This photograph, distributed by the UPI agency in 1980 was awarded the Pulitzer prize without the identity of his author being known. Shot on August 27th, 1979, it captures the shooting of Kurdish men by soldiers of the Iranian theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini, at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Since its publication, nothing else was known about the author of this photo, which has travelled the world and has become a symbol of terror imposed by religious fanaticism. Many years later (in 2006) and the identity of the photographer,was finally dicovered by the Wall Street Journal. Jahangir Razmi was an Iranian reporter for the Ettela'at newspaper, that was granted the permission to photograph the executions by the judge that sentence the Kurdish to death.

At the time, the editor of the Ettela'at, afraid of government reprisal, didn't mention the name of the author of the single picture of the execution he published. A wise decision, since, on the next day, the Ettela'at newsroom was invaded by the regime's police that didn't shut the newspaper down because the damage done by the photos would've been much worse had they all been published.

It's that set of twenty-six pictures that Razmi carefully kept and the detailed story of the events surrounding its publication that the Wall Street Journal has finally brought to light. Last year Jahangir Razmi was officially acknowledged as the author of the "Firing Squad in Iran" photograph and was able to finally recieve his Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography of 1980.