Paradise lost: Persia from above is a unique photographic record of a fascinating land. Georg Gerster, a pioneer of aerial photography, was granted unprecedented permission to record the landscapes and cities of Persia in the late 1970s. This is an extract from Gerster's introduction to the book, published by Phaidon in 2009:
Flying on business over Iran, I had been struck by the thought that Persia's natural and cultural landscape was predestined to be viewed from the air, with its salt deserts, gardens like slices of paradise, and waterless wind-sculpted wastes. The idea of the bird's eye view certainly wasn't incongruous: the Homa, half eagle, half bird of paradise, is a mythical beast of Persian mythology, a harbinger of good fortune.
On 12 October 1975 I delivered a letter by hand to the imperial court in Tehran, suggesting that I should produce a book, 'Persia through the eyes of the Homa'.
The response from Tehran was encouraging: Empress Farah expressed a hope that the aerial views of her country would be enriching, both artistically and philosophically. But several weeks went by without further news, and I began to feel a little uneasy. Had I pushed my luck too far? To my great relief, towards the end of December 1975, an Iranian with whom I was not acquainted invited me to come and speak with him. The next morning in Vienna, he got straight to the point: 'What kind of an aeroplane do you want us to buy for you?'
Between 11 April 1976 and 30 May 1978, I made more than a hundred flights, completing a total of 300 flying hours. My pilots - supplied by the national airline - were well-trained flyers, although I found one or two of them more inclined to buffoonery than was good for them. One time, for fun and simply to show off, one of them landed on the busy Tehran-Mashhad highway. He was also somewhat lacking in map reading skills: several times he flew us into the Soviet Union.
On 16 January 1979, the Shah and Empress Farah left the country for what would prove to be the last time. The revolution put an end to my photographic flights, and the planned book had to wait thirty years
