Iran: Images From Beneath a Chador

In 1979, when Randy Hope Goodman was 24 years old and a recent graduate in sociology from Boston University, a group of Iranian college students (no older than she) forcibly took control of the American Embassy in Tehran, taking Americans hostage. Three months into the "hostage crisis", Goodman found herself in Iran as the photographer for a grassroots delegation of Americans invited by the Iranian students holding the hostages. The purpose of that delegation visit was to learn firsthand why the embassy was stormed and to discuss ways to resolve the conflict.

This exhibit combines photographs taken during that first visit in 1980, with those from two subsequent visits. In '81, she and two colleagues were contracted by CBS-TV News to gather video and were the sole US media credentialed in Iran. Returning in '83 for Time magazine, she toured the Iran-Iraq war zone and had the exclusive opportunity to photograph Ayatollah Khomeini. Her moving photographs capture the spirit of those swept up in the wake of these momentous events: wives and fathers, soldiers and civilians, people whose lives were irrevocably changed by revolution, war and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While this is the first exhibit of her Iran work, Randy's photographs have been widely published in newspapers and magazines throughout the world including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post and in Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Libya, Italy and Spain.