A short break...

I just took the most peculiar photo, during a lunch break on the bus journey from Tehran to Astaneh. The image itself– a simple landscape of a green valley lined by bare mountains – was not particularly peculiar. But something else was: for the first time after many years, I took a “real” photo again, analogue on 35mm film. A kind of nostalgia overcame me at the sound of the film rolling on, right after the exposure – such a short sound, but it seemed a hundred times longer than the split-second it takes for a digital camera to merely open and close the shutter.
But more than the sound, it was the feeling of holding the old Canon in my hand – so much lighter than its digital sister that it seems like a toy, with a body so thin that the muscle memory in my hand is firing alarm, as if something is wrong. It also has something incredibly simple about it – a severe lack of buttons, screens and switches if compared to even the simplest of cameras today – one automatic/manual switch, one turning wheel for the various programs, three buttons and one tiny screen announcing the shooting mode and the number of images left. The latter is of course one of the most astonishing parts: there is a limit to your trigger-happiness: 24 or 36 at a time, as opposed to hundreds or more in any little Digicam.

Strange to think that at some point in the past people used to say “Wow, that’s a fancy camera!” when they saw it, while now it looks aged, frail and outdated, if not even crippled somehow, with its many scars, dents and scratches. I must have taken a few thousand photos with that camera and it accompanied me wherever I went, from South Africa to Italy, from Alaska to India, from Norway to Bhutan and last but not least: to Iran.
And here I am with my old analogue Canon, taking a picture of an Iranian landscape on a black&white film roll that might well have been inside the camera since I was last here in 2004. I must have ‘converted’ to digital shortly after that trip; and now that some unknown thief or maybe by now a lucky eBayer owns my beloved digital camera (which I inherited from one of the UK’s upcoming star photographers), I am back to analogue and back in Iran.


I should really be studying, of course, I am doing my M.Sc. after all, but the chance to fly to Iran to attend the wedding of one of my longest and best friends, in the hills on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea… well, I just couldn’t let that pass.

The first time I came to visit Hamid in Iran was in 2002, but I can remember it as though it was the day before yesterday. I arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning and took a taxi from Mehrabad airport to his dormitory. The streets were empty as if the vast greyness of Tehran had wiped out human existence – except for a few men in orange overalls, crouching against the side of the highway, brushing the ground as the taxi whizzed past. I managed to wake up the dorm’s night guard and to convince him to let me in, but I couldn’t get him to let Hamid know that I had arrived, nor to tell me where his room was. This was not because I didn’t speak a word of Farsi, but simply because the guard was of the opinion that Hamid deserved a good measure of sleep and ought not to be woken up before 6am. He pointed me to the prayer room and signalled that I could sleep or wait there. So I took my shoes off and entered the simple room that was filled with little carpets and the concentrated smell of feet.
It turned out that Hamid didn’t expect me till the day after, so when he came down the stairs in his pyjamas, wondering why the guard had called him, he nearly slipped on the last steps when he saw me.

This time my arrival was well-announced and well-planned. Hamid had made sure that his friend would pick me up at the airport, host me for the night in Tehran and put me on the bus to Astaneh the next morning, where he was waiting for me. A lot had happened in the four years since Hamid and I last met in Iran – for one thing he wasn’t living here anymore and I had seen him twice already in his new home in Canada. Like so many young Iranians, especially those with a degree, he had made every effort to leave the country, applied for scholarships and finally got accepted both in New York and at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in a tiny town in south-eastern Canada. He couldn’t get a visa to the US, despite his 25,000 $ scholarship, so he settled for Canada. And after a few years there, he met Najme, a fellow Iranian. She was also studying at UNB… and now they’re getting married in Iran, in Najme’s hometown of Astaneh, near the Caspian Sea.
It takes only haf an hour to get there by plane, but a grand total of 6-7 hours by bus, which is fine with me, as I wanted some time to write this and to sleep a bit. The landscape is now becoming increasingly green, as we move north-west through the mountains toward the Sea. Descending into the planes, there are even rice fields, flooded with water – a strange sight for Iran, the eastern half of which is covered with a dry, salty desert. I take another photo through the bus window. Instinctively I look at the back of the camera to check the preview of the image I just took – and I have to smile – the bare, black back of my old Canon stares at me as if to say: “I’m sorry for my inadequacy.”
It’s quite allright, I reply.