Celebrated photojournalist Majid Saeedi was arrested in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election and charged with misleading the public, crimes against national security and taking part in illegal protests. He was also targeted because he distributed photographs to “enemies of the Islamic Republic”.
Name: Majid Saeedi
Born: Tehran, 1974
Career: Photographer; former head of photography departments for nine Iranian newspapers, including Abrar, Akhbar and Iran; head of Fars News Agency Photography Service; Time magazine’s photographer in Afghanistan; photographer for Getty Images in the Middle East.
Awards: Chosen as Iran’s best photographer seven times between 1992 and 2001; second prize at the International Arts Festival (2005); four gold medals from Asahi Shimbun Agency, Japan (2000-2008); first prize at the International Photo Awards, USA (2005); third prize for Pictures of the Year, USA (2007); Unicef Photography Prize (2010), FotoEvidence Book Award for work in Afghanistan (2014).
Charges: Activities against national security, misleading the public, participation in illegal gatherings, communication with enemies of the Islamic Republic, distribution of photographs to enemies of the Islamic Republic.
Majid Saeedi started his career in photography when he was 16 and at 18 traveled to the Iran-Iraq border to photograph war refugees. For many years his photographs were published in reformist and fundamentalist newspapers alike.
But after the 2009 disputed presidential election, it was not only journalists and bloggers that faced arrest. Photojournalists were also targeted. Saeedi and four other photographers were arrested on charges of “photographing protests and selling them to foreigners.” Following continuing pressure, many other photographers fled the country.
Saeedi was arrested at home on 10 July 2009. Police confiscated his photography equipment and interrogated him at an unknown location for four days. He was then taken to Evin Prison and spent 40 days either in solitary confinement or in small four-prisoner cells.
Following this, he was released on bail. Presiding judge Mohammad Moghisei—well known for handing down harsh sentences for opposition journalists and activists—sentenced him to three years in prison.
“If everybody respected the law I would have been pronounced ‘not guilty’,” he told the Global Post. “I only carried out my journalistic duty. I photographed the Mousavi election rally in the same way that I photographed Ahmadinejad’s rally. Why did they put me on trial for photographing one and not the other?”
Saeedi has said that his love of photography is what keeps him alive. When he felt he could no longer photograph freely in Iran, he emigrated to Afghanistan. Since his move there in 2010, he has been honored with several international awards for his photography of Afghanistan.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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