Re-Creating the Citadel and the Photographs of Kaveh Golestan

A political archaeology of a lesser-studied crime committed during Iran’s nascent Islamic state

Located in southwest Tehran, Shahr-e No was the city’s historic red-light district, designated as such since the early 1920s. As part of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic state destroyed the area and displaced some 1,500 sex workers who lived there. The following year, Shahr-e No was completely razed. Photographer Kaveh Golestan (1950–2003) created one of the rare surviving records of this vanished neighborhood through his photographic series The Citadel, comprising 61 photographs produced between 1975 and 1977. The book Re-Creating the Citadel revitalizes the seminal series, recovering the social and spatial experiences associated with the area: its relation to human life, social aesthetics, politics and dynamics, and the relationship between marginal and metropolitan citizenry. It unmasks an early and lesser-studied crime, exposing it as a perpetuation of a state-enforced project of violence against the citizen and history itself.