Screen Time

Holy, I am tired. It’s like I’ve been sprint­ing for four months straight. Work­ing two jobs is get­ting to be pretty rough. I spend all day wish­ing for one of these:

Mattress and box spring on Booth St., Lebreton Flats.

Mat­tress and box spring on Booth St., Lebre­ton Flats. I’m going to miss Lebre­ton Flats when the devel­op­ment is done.

My co-workers joke that I’ll be bring­ing a bed-roll into work soon. Late in the after­noon the other day, my neigh­bor came around the corner to find me sit­ting in front of the com­puter, blank star­ing, with the tele­phone receiver just hanging in my hand. “Go home” she said.

I see the screen-zombies all over, trans­fixed like I was. When did it become nor­mal to spend 16 hours a day in front of a glow­ing panel, whatever the size?  I see them , the walk­ing not-quite-dead-but-entertained, tak­ing their dogs out in the even­ing. I see them on the bus. I see them doing all kind of things. What does it mean that so many people absent them­selves from real­ity to spend time with a tech­no­lo­gic­ally medi­ated cul­tural product?  I feel anti­so­cial when I click-clack away at my very very import­ant meet­ing regis­tra­tion emails on my Black­berry. Are we all scared of shar­ing space with other people? More likely we’d rather spend our time with our own little niche of social and cul­tural secur­ity than think about the world “out there” bey­ond our skin.

As a pho­to­grapher, I feel some­times that I’m exper­i­en­cing the world from behind a fil­ter. I won­der if look­ing at the world through a key­hole is lim­it­ing. But then, think­ing back through photo-school, to my days at the night lab, I remem­ber the won­der­ful feel­ing of dis­cov­er­ing pho­to­graphy. It was more like dis­cov­er­ing how to see crit­ic­ally. I remem­ber the sen­sa­tion of sur­prise and glory of look­ing at the world in with a new aware­ness. Pho­to­graphy is not about tak­ing pic­tures, its about noti­cing the world and mak­ing note. Pho­to­graphy is about a kind an aware­ness of the world and one’s self that you just can’t get in front of a screen.

I miss you

"I miss you", in Trinity-Bellwoods park, Toronto

“I miss you”, in Trinity-Bellwoods park, Toronto, April 2009

Well, time flies. The MSF show was tonight (and through Sunday) at La Petite Mort and everything went well. Turnout was great, and most of the peices sold — mine was snapped up pretty quick. My favor­ite peice is a pho­to­graph by my friend Pedro Isztin of his father and nephew. Check out the show if you’re bum­ming around Ott­awa this week­end with noth­ing to do. The pho­to­graph above, “I miss you,” was my donation.

I was in Toronto last spring for a con­fer­ence. After the second day, I rode my bor­rowed bicycle home from the CN Tower, through Trinity-Bellwoods park, up the little hill, and along the path past the ten­nis courts toward Col­lege and Dan­forth. That is where I saw the let­ters stitched into the fence. It was spring, still wet, and although the sun was warm it was still a little cold too. I don’t know why the words were there, or what they mean. I found them com­fort­ing, in a way, like I had been let into a private con­ver­sa­tion between lov­ers, albeit in one direction.

It was a pho­to­graphy con­fer­ence. Not want­ing to look like a big nerd (or at least a big­ger one than I already am), I brought my little Min­olta pocket cam­era with me. Maybe that makes me even nerdier. Whatever. In any case, the little no-controls-all-automatic brick of hard plastic and metal did a great job on that trip, and I got a few great pho­tos. Great because they are import­ant to me.

It was a heady time, those months that I spent shut­tling back and forth to the Big Smoke. I was there three times in six weeks. Each visit brought me a little closer to the pos­sib­lity of mak­ing some­thing of pho­to­graphy. Every time I went things seemed a little more real. I gained a lot of con­fid­ence. Going to Toronto gave me the push I needed to start a series of invest­ments that have res­ul­ted in some inter­est­ing, excit­ing, and reward­ing work over the past few months. This photo is a product and a sym­bol of the pro­cess of re-investent that has allowed me to grow as an artist. It was long overdue.

It’s really nice to see your work hanging in a gallery.

MSF Photo Fundraiser

a lost white diaper

a lost white diaper sits on the pave­ment out­side the First Baptist Church, corner of Elgin and Laur­ier, Ottawa

In just under two weeks, I’ll be par­ti­cip­at­ing in a fun­draiser for Méde­cins Sans Frontières involving many of Ottawa’s best pho­to­graph­ers. Held at Ottawa’s most pleas­ure ori­ented gal­lery come party spot, it’s shap­ing up to be a not-to-miss event. Par­tic­u­larly so because all prints will be $100, a real steal, and all pro­ceeds go to MSF. Asuage your guilty con­science, enjoy art, and get drunk all in the same place. Would I ever steer you wrong?

La Petite Mort Gal­lery presents…

Human­it­ari­an­ism through Art A Fun­draiser for Méde­cins Sans Frontières / Doc­tors Without Bor­ders (MSF) Canada

Septem­ber 25 — 27, 2009

Ver­n­is­sage: Fri­day Sept 25 / 7 – 10 pm
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM

More info: http://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/events/DoctorsWithoutBorders2009.htm

See you there!

Song of the Summer

Well, it was late arriv­ing, but this is offi­cially the song of the summer:

This little pop gem is on repeat at my house, and I almost have the dance moves nailed. Amaz­ing. Rap­ture. Once it gets in your head, there’s no turn­ing back. Finally, credit where credit is due: this video was a tip from my friend Catri­ona Stur­ton.

It was a long year

Welcome Home balloons

Wel­come Home balloons

I walked into my father’s bar last week, and was met by a room full of fresh faces, young and tanned. That is the sign, that is how I know sum­mer is soon to be over. Every­one is back from hol­i­days, and school is about to start up again. There were a lot of new back­packs on the bus today. On my ride to work, a teen­age girl didn’t know how to get off in front of the high school. She couldn’t find the pres­sure strip, with all it’s mark­ings worn off by end­less fin­gers. I had my own bus woes to start the day. Stand­ing on the plat­form, I watched 3 buses pass as I waited for my con­nec­tion. It was a half hour before I real­ized that con­struc­tion had fin­ished on the other side of the sta­tion, and that my stop had moved. It’s a con­fus­ing and excit­ing time for every­one, me included.

I was late for work.

This time last year, I was just get­ting ready for another new start. Going back to school was excit­ing. I’d been out for two years. With all the float­ing around and drop­ping out I’ve done, I was wor­ried about being older than all the other stu­dents. It turned out that I actu­ally liked being older. When you’re one of the few adults in a room of 500 seventeen-year-olds, the other adults have a way of find­ing you. That in itself was a bit of a rev­el­a­tion. It was the first year I actu­ally felt like an adult. It was a hard year, an adult year. I was work­ing two or three jobs a week, and going to school full time. Things were going alright, until our land­lord star­ted to go crazy. My room­mate and I were almost illeg­ally evicted in the middle of the winter. It was too much, and life star­ted to fall apart. I showed up to work in ripped jeans once or twice. We relied on my father to bring gro­cer­ies from Costco, and ate a lot of Chinese pork buns. Some­how, I scraped through the end of school and ended up doing fairly well. I was look­ing for­ward to going back this year. I was look­ing for­ward to end­ing the mara­thon, get­ting settled, and focus­ing on my studies.

Then the offer came. A good job. A real Job, with a desk, and a salary, bene­fits. A “bridge in” that I took.

This is my fourth week. Tech­nic­ally, my title is “Ana­lyst, Inform­a­tion Trans­fer and Out­put” as part of the Policy and Research depart­ment of the Canada Mort­gage and Hous­ing Cor­por­a­tion. In real­ity, I am an online pro­du­cer and (mostly digital) out­reach worker for hous­ing research­ers. I pull the strings that sup­port an online com­munity. I do everything from organ­iz­ing con­fer­ence calls and social net­work­ing to inform­a­tion archi­tec­ture design and usab­il­ity meas­ure­ment. It is an inter­est­ing little eddy of the gov­ern­ment that I’ve found myself in, and a scary new world out there on the inter-webs. Luck­ily, the work I do is for a leg­ally dis­tinct non-governmental organ­iz­a­tion, so we can do some fun stuff.

Discarded clothes at night

Dis­carded clothes under the streetlight

And the mara­thon con­tin­ues. This time, how­ever, it’s dif­fer­ent. This time, it is my choice. It was hard to put down my plans to go to school, hard to switch gears so sud­denly. But with the oppor­tun­ity of steady employ­ment comes the free­dom to do what I couldn’t before: per­sonal work. In my opin­ion, all good pho­to­graphy is per­sonal. I am a feel­ing pho­to­grapher, I go by emo­tion and see by feel. Work­ing lets me pur­sue per­sonal the pro­jects I could never jus­tify when I was hust­ling work and scrap­ing by. In the long run, I feel that it  is my per­sonal work that will mat­ter most. Chris­topher Mor­ris once said that the best way to suc­ceed in pho­to­graphy is to quit. I think that this is what I am doing.

And I’ve been invest­ing in myself at the same time. I found my voice at the end of a very long year. A con­fer­ence and a couple of work­shops helped. New friends and new per­spect­ives were invalu­able. A whole bunch of new gear, with new cap­ab­il­it­ies, made a big dif­fer­ence too. I’m more focused, more tuned-in, turned on, and aware. I read visual the­ory, and a bunch of good fic­tion. My thoughts are more clear. I feel like I am tak­ing the next step towards doing mean­ing­ful doc­u­ment­ary work on a reg­u­lar basis. I’m ready, and now I have the resources to make it happen.

Sum­mer is almost over, it’s time to get to work. Time for another long year.

Light tests from history — part 1

a little bit of alcoholic foreshadowing

a little bit of alco­holic foreshadowing

When it comes to pho­to­graphy, I’ve seen a lot in a rel­at­ively short time. I’ve been to crazy places, and met amaz­ing people. I’ve filled many dif­fer­ent roles along the way. Some­times pho­to­graphy is just a lot of hard work, but I’ve been lucky and priv­ileged to have a lot of fun at the same time. Today, part one of a three part series about assist­ing in the early-ier days of my pho­to­graphy career.

Back when my friend Aaron McK­en­zie Fraser was liv­ing in Ott­awa (and I was start­ing out in pho­to­graphy), we did a few jobs together. I didn’t assist for Aaron very much, but I was there for what were some pretty choice gigs. Like the time we pho­to­graphed Stephan Dion. In the lead-up to the Lib­eral lead­er­ship race, Aaron was hired to take por­traits of the can­did­ate. It was an early-morning appoint­ment, so we tested the light­ing setup a couple days in advance. I don’t remem­ber how Aaron got that job, but it seemed like a bit of a minor coup, and I sure did not want to mess it up.

When the day came, Dion brought a bevy of assist­ants in tow. His advisers and con­sult­ants installed them­selves on the big green couch in Aaron’s liv­ing room. The woman in charge of fash­ion decided that more red ties were needed. The young assist­ant was sent out, and soon returned with a fist­ful of crim­son cravats from Harry Rosen.

Dion was skinny and pale in his boxer shorts, like a boy. He seemed aloof, dis­tant. He was unin­ter­ested in the pro­ceed­ings unfold­ing before him in the little apart­ment in Centre­town. The large screw­driver he drank a few minutes later dis­pelled any delu­sions of polit­ical infancy or waver­ing of pur­pose.  The abil­ity to drink stead­ily at all hours of the day is mark of a seasoned politician.

There was a brain whirr­ing behind Dion’s eyes. Every few minutes he’d call an order for some mes­sage to be given, some report to be retrieved.

A sad day for Stephan Dion

A sad day for Stephan Dion

“Turn your head to the left.”

“Get so-and-so’s paper on envir­on­mental policy from my desk for my meet­ing with X this afternoon.”

“Tilt your chin up.”

“Ensure we get such-and-such state­ment on the website.”

“Smile.”

Flash. Click. Repeat.

He was a man on fire, but we gave him not a hope in Hades of win­ning the lead­er­ship. I spec­u­lated at the time that his can­did­acy was an attempt to become king­maker and secure a plum post in the com­ing Lib­eral gov­ern­ment. Funny how things turned out.

As the elec­tion pro­gressed, I was impressed by Dion. He seemed, by far, the smartest of the bunch of jokers we call lead­ers these days. He was earn­est, hon­est, endear­ing even. His policies were ahead of the times. His tax green tax scheme was pro­gress­ive (and not that hard to under­stand), if polit­ic­ally pois­on­ous. He spoke Eng­lish bet­ter than any of the oth­ers spoke French.  He may not have been a good politi­cian, but he would have made a great Prime Min­is­ter. It’s too bad the Lib­eral party was divided and broke. It’s too bad we have the same spite­ful and ill-spirited Prime Min­is­ter again. People say they want a politi­cian they can trust, but what they really want is tax-breaks.

Some­where between the day I saw Stephan Dion in his under­wear and elec­tion day, I changed my vote to sup­port the Lib­er­als. To me, Dion is the best of kind of Cana­dian: an intel­li­gent, just, and thought­ful per­son who could straddle the divides of our coun­try to forge a bet­ter future. Maybe one day we’ll get over our petty regional dif­fer­ences and be a real country.

Next time: Aaron and I on the tar­mac with fighter pilots, and one amaz­ing slice of bread.

Heads up, good stories!

After a long and ram­bling post the other day, I’ll keep it short this time — I have a couple of read­ings worth your time. I’m not totally con­vinced by the online magazine. It’s a format in infancy, the kinks haven’t been worked out yet. And yet, this week two online magazines caught my attention:

Rooftops by Ernesto Ramirez

First up, 7.7, a web­site pro­duced by a col­lect­ive of pho­to­graph­ers and photo-pros from Bar­celona. Of artic­u­lar note is Close to Heaven by Ern­esto Ramirez (report­age num­ber 4).  This is a sur­pris­ingly subtle and intim­ate med­it­a­tion on the flat-top roof. Shot in black and white pan­or­ama format, the series explores the elev­ated sanc­tu­ary of the big-city rooftop. As a side note, to my neigh­bors in Montreal: your mid-night roof-top soc­cer was not equally edifying.

Lorena Ros' "A fate sealed with voodoo"

Second, a web mag called 100 Eyes. Pro­duced by pho­to­grapher Andy Levin, 100 Eyes pub­lishes col­lec­tions of pho­to­graphic essays on a topic or theme. This edi­tion is called The Migrants. It is a brood­ing, scath­ing look at one of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ics of globalization. More people than ever find them­selves stuck and work­ing in a limbo; divorced from their homes, them­selves, and com­munity. Whether a migrant or not, global migra­tion is chan­ging the world we live in. 1000 Eyes: The migrants is a crit­ical depic­tion of the real and per­sonal effects of migra­tion, and, by extension, the dangers of glob­al­iz­a­tion. In por­tray­ing the isol­a­tion of this dislocation, Lorena Ros’ series on Nigerian women is par­tic­u­larly damning.

Neda and the News

Neda Agha-Soltan

I got up from my com­puter, shuffled into the kit­chen, put the kettle on, and had myself a little sob. I’d been writ­ing about women join­ing the protests in Iran, and of the import­ance of pic­tures of young, attract­ive, female pro­test­ers, when I saw the video. I had been glued to the com­puter, read­ing everything and any­thing I could about Iran. It was power­ful moment recor­ded in shaky video. Power­ful enough to change the world, and I knew it, but I didn’t tell any­one. There were a mere 300 views at the time, before the young woman had a name.  Watch­ing the reac­tion the next day in the news, I wished that I had kept on writ­ing. With time, the import­ance of that moment has only grown. With more time, it will come to be a defin­ing image, not just of the pro­gress move­ment in Iran, but for mod­ern soci­ety and the world in gen­eral. Neda Agha-Soltan’s death, and the way in which it was recor­ded, holds an import­ant mes­sage and a lesson.

A few months ago, I went to a con­fer­ence for pho­to­journ­al­ists. At that con­fer­ence, Brian Storm gave a stir­ring present­a­tion about the future of journ­al­ism. His com­pany, Mediastorm, is an industry leader in mul­ti­me­dia pro­duc­tion, and has been for some time. When Brian Storm talks about the future and poten­tial of mul­ti­me­dia, people pay atten­tion. They don’t always like what they hear, but they know he’s prob­ably at least half-right. I recor­ded part of that present­a­tion, and pos­ted the video online. In a few weeks, it received 12 view­ings, most likely all of them were by me and the two people I sent the link. Viral video, this wasn’t. No, it was a grainy, dark, and muddy sound­ing seven minute record­ing, eons by You­Tube stand­ards. Then I received this:

Hey man, I get paid lots of money to give my present­a­tions and it doesn’t help me to have this on You­Tube. Can you please remove it?

Brian Storm says the news­pa­per is dead. Actu­ally, he uses the words “death spiral.” I think he is right. As he would say, the busi­ness of ship­ping dead wood to sub­scribers is inef­fi­cient, out­moded, and old-fashioned. New, money-making forms of journ­al­ism have not yet come to fruition, but they will soon. To some, this is a scary time to be in journ­al­ism. For oth­ers, like me, it is most excit­ing. There is a real oppor­tun­ity to tell stor­ies in new and enga­ging ways. What I find inter­est­ing, and I think Brian would agree, is the abil­ity of new media to inter­act with audi­ences. Here, in the new, confabulatory, media, is where the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is a defin­ing moment.

Brian Storm makes “plat­form agnostic” videos and inter­act­ive mul­ti­me­dia present­a­tions. Although many involve pho­to­graphy, they are essen­tialy of three storytelling tra­di­tions: the slideshow, the doc­u­ment­ary film, and the map. The video of Neda Agha-Soltan is none of these things. It is a single shot, too short to give nar­rat­ive or con­text. Although details did emerge, the video itself lacks intro­duc­tion or nar­ra­tion. Like a pho­to­graph, the power of the video is in the raw emo­tional con­tent and the imme­di­ate impres­sion of the scene and events. In this way, the video is more like a pho­to­graph than a film.

There has been great pres­sure over these last few months and years for pho­to­graph­ers to pro­duce pho­to­graphs and videos at the same time. Clearly, we are poised for a revolu­tion of mul­ti­me­dia con­tent. Most of my cli­ents are ask­ing for video, even the most inter­net un-savvy ones. The appeal of video is undeni­able. But how are we sup­posed to do it?  How, after spend­ing years devel­op­ing ones’ eye for the still image, are pho­to­graph­ers sup­posed to make the trans­ition to video?  Neda shows that there is a third way. The qual­ity of the video is actu­ally sec­ond­ary, what mat­ters is that it is now pos­sible to make video any­where. Pho­to­graph­ers should leave the film-making to doc­u­ment­ary film makers, and focus on what pho­to­graphy is good at: giv­ing a power­ful impres­sion of what it is like to be in a place, as some­thing is hap­pen­ing. We can do this in video.

It used to be that gov­ern­ments had a near-monopoly on sur­veil­lance, or at least an easy time of stem­ming the flow of inform­a­tion. This is no longer true. Every­one, every­where, is now a watch­dog. Sur­veil­lance is ubi­quit­ous and ever present, and the abil­ity of indi­vidual people to dis­trib­ute inform­a­tion is unpre­ced­en­ted. Nowhere in pub­lic is there ever really pri­vacy any­more. As the video of Neda Agha-Soltan illustrates, surveillance and com­mu­nic­a­tion tools in the hands of indi­vidu­als do affect the beha­viour of gov­ern­ments in the exer­cise of power.

The role of open trans­mis­sion net­works is as import­ant as the dis­trib­uted pro­duc­tion of con­tent. How­ever, this omni­pres­ence of record­ing and easy dis­tri­bu­tion cre­ates a lot of “noise”. Bal­anced, researched, and trust­worthy report­ing is even more import­ant today, but lost in a sea of per­son­al­ized RSS feeds and status updates. News organ­iz­a­tions are bur­ied, they’re in a crisis of rel­ev­ance. They must adopt and adapt by first accept­ing that con­tent is more import­ant than style, speed trumps accur­acy but accur­acy is essen­tial, and invest­ment in innov­a­tion and youth are needed. If they are going to sur­vive, as Brian Storm would say, news­pa­pers need to recon­sider who they are talk­ing to, and remem­ber that advert­ising is valu­able only so long as it is rel­ev­ant. There is no reason, other than short­sighted­ness and cal­ci­fic­a­tion, that indi­vidual blog­gers should be more rel­ev­ant than news­pa­pers. They are, because news­pa­pers have failed to “talk” to an increas­ingly frac­tured and isol­ated read­er­ship. This needs to be over­come. Why can’t I read my local news­pa­per in Face­book? News­pa­pers used to have it right: they hit people where they lived. Now they don’t talk to any­one. People live online.

Neda Agha-Soltan died June 20th, 2009. Events in Iran con­tinue to develop. While the world of news and inform­a­tion may be changed by her death, we will likely have to wait until the 40th day of the mourn­ing cycle to see what she will mean for Iran. That day is com­ing soon, and there will be thou­sands of people with cell phones to record it.

bonus:

more on MediaStorm http://dwmojos.wordpress.com/interviews/brian-storm–mediastorm/

Photos from the streets of Tehran

In the tur­moil and con­fu­sion of the post-election Iran, strict con­trol of inform­a­tion is a key tool in quash­ing dis­sent. Media access is severely restric­ted, for­eign journ­al­ists are con­fined to their hotels, and com­mu­nic­a­tions net­works are being dis­mantled. There are even reports of mili­tias con­fis­cat­ing satel­lite dishes. The cur­tain has been drawn on Iran. It is, how­ever, already too late.

A man with a briefcase prepares to throw a peice of concrete during post-election protests in Tehran, Iran

A man with a briefcase pre­pares to throw a peice of con­crete dur­ing post-election protests in Tehran, Iran

Defin­ing images of the con­flict have already been pro­duced. Some of the best come from French pho­to­grapher Olivier Laban-Mattei, a staff pho­to­grapher for Agence-France Press. He seems to be every­where at once in these pho­tos, like some sort of all-seeing super-human.

Pho­tos from protests, even viol­ent protests, are often all the same: masked pro­test­ers, scary riot police, outraged march­ers, hoo­ligans. These pho­tos trans­mit noth­ing more than the basic and obvi­ous: some people are upset. Here is an image that oper­ates on a higher level. Laban-Mattei’s photo of a cement-throwing office worker gives us much more than a simple story of anger and viol­ence. In effect, the story of the pho­to­graph extends far past the bor­ders of the frame.  It raises ques­tions. Why is this man dressed for work?  Was he com­pelled to join on the way home from his job?  What is in the briefcase?  What would com­pel a seem­ingly nor­mal per­son to engage in pub­lic violence?

A young Iranian man covers his face with a blood soaked hankercheif

There is incred­ible sym­bolic con­tent to the photo of the young man cov­er­ing his face with a blood-soaked ker­chief. It appears that he is cry­ing tears. There is also a reflex­ive qual­ity to this pho­to­graph, in the sense that you can feel the pres­ence of the pho­to­grapher in the situ­ation. I think that this qual­ity, pres­ence, is an integ­ral part of effect­ive pho­to­graphy and hon­est report­ing. The truth and value of pho­tos like these is in the feel­ing of intim­ate real­ity that they provide. Only pho­to­graphy can do this, freez­ing forever that moment, so that the exist­ence of this frac­tion of a second can­not be for­got­ten or refuted. In a sense, this photo is not really about the young man. He is an object, a per­son without past or future bey­ond this moment. What is real, and tran­scend­ent, about this pho­to­graph is the rela­tion­ship between the pho­to­grapher and the sub­ject. View­ing this photo, I feel like I am there.

Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mousavi waves to supporters at a mass protest in Tehran, Iran

Defeated Ira­nian pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate Mousavi waves to sup­port­ers at a mass protest in Tehran, Iran

Pho­to­graphs like these will come to define the con­flict in Iran. Already, the pho­to­graph of the young man covered in blood has been turned into posters car­ried by march­ers. Ira­ni­ans face an extremely chal­len­ging situ­ation. SMS (text mes­saging) ser­vices, cell phone ser­vice, radio trans­mis­sions, and Inter­net are being jammed. Still, mes­sages are escap­ing the fil­ter. An extraordin­ary num­ber of mov­ing videos and pho­tos have been recor­ded and uploaded by pro­test­ers them­selves. For the regime, it is already too late, pho­to­graphs like these have escaped to expose the con­flict to the world, and more import­antly, to Ira­ni­ans. Whatever the out­come of this crisis, it will be impossible in the com­ing years to deny the viol­ence and injustice of these days. The regime will be changed by the test­a­ment of doc­u­ment­ary photography.

I under­stand that Olivier Laban-Mattei is now en-route back to France.

Something is happening in Iran

In 1996, Atlantic con­trib­ut­ing editor Robert Kaplan pub­lished a whirl­wind travelogue named The Ends of the Earth: a Jour­ney to the Fron­ti­ers of Anarchy.In the chapters cov­er­ing Iran, Kaplan writes:
“The bor­ing truth about the Islamic Revolu­tion is that the rich are still rich, and the poor are still poor. The only real change is that the middle class was largely des­troyed. True or not, the poor feel that Iran lost the war with Iraq and the clergy are to blame. What you have left is an alli­ance between rad­ical mul­lahs and the secur­ity ser­vices. Together, these two groups can do things like help ter­ror­ists abroad and try to acquire a nuc­lear bomb– actions which allow them to pro­claim that the revolu­tion is still alive. But their sup­port is increas­ingly thin, and the soci­ety at home is headed in a com­pletely oppos­ite direction.”
In other Words, the battle between East and West was not being fought between the United States and Iran but inside Iran itself, between Iranians.”
Today, the con­flict between rad­ical Islam and reform leaped from the impli­cit to the interne­cine and all too real. Kaplan continues:
…the issue of “fun­da­ment­al­ism” in Iran, and the West’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with it, was about to be over­taken by lar­ger shifts in the political-historical land­scape that few could yet fathom.
It took twelve years for Kaplan’s pre­dic­tion to come true.

This change was a long time com­ing. In fact, some Iran observ­ers were sur­prised by the swell of sup­port for the Mousavi from young, urban, and middle-class Ira­ni­ans. We should not be sur­prised. The move­ment toward cul­tural and polit­ical mod­er­a­tion has long been brew­ing. Shortly after The Ends of the Earth was pub­lished, reformers under Khatami cap­tured 70% of the vote and a major­ity in the Ira­nian par­lia­ment. The women and young people who voted for Khatami’S Second of Khordad Move­ment almost a dec­ade ago are still voters today. Fol­low­ing the dis­qual­i­fic­a­tion of most pro­gress­ive can­did­ates, the elec­tions which brought Mah­moud Ahmad­ine­jad to power were largely boy­cot­ted. This time around, how­ever, things were dif­fer­ent. Although he is more con­ser­vat­ive than most Ira­nian pro­gress­ives, sup­port coalesced under Mousavi. Like in the United States, new tech­no­logy ener­gized and engaged pro­gress­ive Ira­ni­ans, and played a pivotal role in Mousavi’s cam­paign. Urban Ira­ni­ans were ready for change — a smooth, demo­cratic one.

But, as Kaplan says, it is not the city that makes a coun­try mod­ern, it is the town. Rural and urban Ira­ni­ans live in dif­fer­ent worlds. Iran is a coun­try of young people, where the cit­ies mod­ern­ized at an extreme pace under the Shah (even­tu­ally con­trib­ut­ing to the 1979 revolu­tion), and a dis­con­nect exists between the city and the coun­try. At the same time, the city and the coun­try are increas­ingly in contact. Migration has swelled Tehran alone to more than 13 mil­lion and put strain on nat­ural resources. In the last dec­ade, lit­er­acy rates, and the expect­a­tions that go with edu­ca­tion, have risen. Recently, how­ever, infla­tion has hit hard. The con­di­tions seem sim­ilar to those which lead to the 1979 revolution. The elites of Iran are con­ser­vat­ive, coun­try people, who over­threw the Shah. They will not let mod­ern­ism hap­pen easily.

At the time of this post­ing, a crack­down is underway. It appears all per­mits to for­eign journ­al­ists have been revoked and report­ers will face jail if they con­tinue to oper­ate, as did one Globe and Mail reporter. Demon­stra­tions are sched­uled to take place today, and a gen­eral strike tomorrow, with or (likely) without gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion. Young people in Iran will risk their lives to make their voices heard. The world needs to watch, listen, and learn: this is a con­flict that will define how human­ity nego­ti­ates the trans­ition to modernism. Will the regime back down?  Will the assembly of experts (the rul­ing clerics) intervene? How will the needs and desires of the city and the coun­try be balanced?  Will East and West meet peacefully?

For cov­er­age on the state of affairs in Iran, see Andrew Sul­li­van at the Atlantic. The CBC has two report­ers in Tehran.

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