Glimpses of paradise

There were times when he was flying over Iran in the late Seventies that Georg Gerster, the Swiss pioneer of aerial photography, would get twitchy.

He had picked up some excellent American maps of Iran in Dusseldorf and managed to smuggle them into the country despite the fact that they were supposedly forbidden.

But peering down from the back of a Norman-Britten Islander aircraft, international borders don't appear as thick black lines, and anyway, as Gerster tells it, the pilot couldn't read maps.

“When we were over Russian Azerbaijan I constantly expected MiGs to come up, wiggling their wings and saying follow me,'' he recalls on the phone from Switzerland.

“At the time we didn't know that the Russian air defence was so weak and so inexperienced. I thought for every moment that they might shoot us down.''

Another time, unsure of whether they were in Iran or Turkmenistan, the pilot plunged the two-engine aircraft down towards the ground until they were close enough to read an advert for Coca-Cola.

They were still in Iran: the Soviets only had Pepsi.

Humble beginning

Gerster has known more than his fair share of crazed pilots. His career taking pictures from above began in England with an amateur pilot who wanted to show him a view of Stonehenge from his aircraft.

“Of course,'' says Gerster, “it was a very unsuitable aircraft and he, like every other private pilot, tried to impress his passenger by flying low, which I hate because the angle is not right for getting nice pictures.''

His Iranian project came about because he flew over Iran on a commercial flight and was struck by the diversity of the land he saw below him.

Rather than the desert he had expected, there were vast, deep forests, snowy mountains, lush irrigated croplands, cities made from adobe, and to the north, the gleaming expanse of the Caspian sea, the world's largest inland body of water.

In western Iran, the landscape is dotted with the black tents of the nomadic Bakhtyari people; in the northeast one could see Turkomen tribesmen's yurts.

The pyramidal limestone tomb of Cyrus the Great casts a solitary shadow over the Morghab plain, while in the desert near Mahan, trails lead to a rectangle of dark green, a walled garden whose Iranian name — pairidaeza — gave us the word “paradise''.

“There's a scene somewhere,'' says Gerster, “where Ahura, the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, the old Iranian religion, is being asked by Zarathustra, ‘Where is happiness on Earth?' And he answers, ‘Where they grow wheat and herbs, where land is being irrigated, where they are planting trees.'

The husbanding of soil is deeply rooted in the Iranian soul.''
He wrote to the Shah's wife, Farah Diba-Pahlavi, asking for her help in starting a project on Iran from above. For several months there was silence.

Then one day Gerster got a call from a Dr Ali Asghar Azizi, an Iranian who spoke perfect German, inviting him to visit him in Austria.

“The next day I was in Vienna — this was how they worked. After some greetings he said, ‘Well then, what kind of airplane shall we buy for you?' That,'' he laughs, “was a good beginning.''

Extreme measures

Gerster was being advised on where to fly by the world's great expert on Sassanian culture, Dr Dietrich Huff.

When Dr Huff left Iran to work on a dig in Azerbaijan, Dr Azizi, keen to get Gerster back in the air, sent a helicopter to find him in the desert, kidnap him and bring him back to Tehran.

They flew all around Iran. Security questions were never raised, Gerster recalls: “There was a missile site near Hamedan, I believe, and one day we were flying over it and I was photographing, when suddenly beside me there was a jet, looking at me, because I was sitting in the open door with all my cameras, looking like the spy from the storybooks. But nobody ever touched us.''

He took about 100 sorties, taking thousands upon thousands of photographs.

But when the revolution came about in 1979 and the Shah and his family fled the country, the project came to an abrupt end.

Occasionally, a picture would appear in an exhibition. In 2004 some were shown at the mining museum in Bochum. By coincidence Farah Diba-Pahlavi also visited the show in Bochum.

Maryam Sachs, a friend who was accompanying her, contacted Gerster about his pictures, which is how they have come to be published in a book.

A few weeks ago, after a night at the opera, Gerster came home to find a message on his answering machine.

Although they had never met, he recognised Farah Diba-Pahlavi's voice immediately: “I'd seen her lately on several TV shows, so I knew how she speaks. And exactly that was on my answering machine! After 30 years, or more.'' The book — provocatively titled Paradise Lost — is dedicated to her.

“This was really something I had to do. To have free access to this place, one of the most beautiful countries I've ever seen, this was a real gift.''