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​​Consider this image of a man fleeing bombs in Tehran with his dog.

The photo was posted on X by a user named @never_oppressed, who has a display picture which is a still of the Abbas Kiarostami masterpiece, Close-Up. The late Kiarostami’s home in the city of Chizar in Iran was recently damaged by US-Israeli missiles and bombs.

A film students’ staple, Kiarostami’s Close-Up lifted a veil from narrative story-telling which many did not quite know existed in the first place. 

The film is adapted from a real-life incident in which a man pretended to be a famous Iranian filmmaker, got some people to act for him while pretending to make a film and got into trouble in the process. All its actors – everyone from the man, the filmmaker, a reporter, the judge, the passers by, a passenger, to Kiarostami himself – play themselves. This pretence-stripped, brazen telling of an apparently insignificant tale has always enraptured audiences. Many have marvelled at it, at why one of Iran’s most famous cinematic minds, operating as he was under crushing censorship, treated a seemingly tiny story so strangely. But in collapsing the extent to which your disbelief will need to be suspended to watch the film, Kiarostami spoke a new language. His vision of reality gently prodded at a viewer’s preconceptions. The academic Hamid Dabashi likened this fact-as-fantasy translucence to a diaphanous lens. 

Thirty-five years later, in the same city in which Close-Up was shot, this lens and what it shows lends itself to distinct importance. 

User @never_oppressed notes in their post that the photograph they have posted is by one Pooria Hatami. A Google search points to the fact that the Hatami who took the photo is possibly the same Hatami who is a Tehran-based photographer. “Through nature and people, I tell stories,” says the landing page of what appears to be Hatami’s website.

Most of us are not familiar with Hatami. We have seen their photo and known at the back of our minds that this is a person who instead of running from an explosion, waits around to photograph what emerges of it. We have identified the four remarkable aspects of their photograph – that there is smoke in the background, that a city sprawls between the smoke and the foreground, that a sweet dog stares at the cameraman and that with the dog is a man who is as close as can be to a pictorial representation of........

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