An artist’s memoir of imprisonment and resistance under Iran’s authoritarian regime.

By David De Hannay 

Sébastien Faure, the French anarchist, said it best: “Anyone who denies authority and rises up against it  is an anarchist.” 

O Bloody Dictator: A Lament for Iran 

O, behold Ayatollah Ali Khamenei! Cloaked in black and blood, a tyrant crowned in false sanctity. Look  upon his hands—dripping with the lifeblood of poets and children. He who once sold his flesh in  Mashhad’s steamy baths, apprenticed to sin with Navab Safavi, terrorist and lover both. 

Speak, Ali Khamenei! Who taught thee virtue? Was it learned in the steam where desire met coin? Didst  thou master piety as disguise, wearing God’s name like a mask to hide base appetite? 

He proclaims divine law with iron tongue, yet shields Toosi, vile defiler of boys, paying silence in hush money. Is this thy justice? Thy holy command? 

See how he blinds unveiled girls with acid, while his Guards smuggle opium in prayer books. He damns  sin yet traffics women, funds terror, buys foreign whores in distant cities. 

Is this thy caliphate? Built not on scripture but on chains, on prisons, on bones. 

O Iran! Thy philosophers murdered, thy artists silenced, thy children taught fear in the cradle. For Ali  Khamenei rules not as shepherd but as butcher, not as father but as executioner. 

Strip his turban and find the dagger. Remove his cloak and see the coward. 

Cry out, Persia! Name him truly: Bloody Dictator. Parasite upon the people. May history brand him not  God’s sign but Iran’s deepest wound. 

In 1999, I held an exhibition in Tehran. I called it The Nightmare of the Jinn Children. It was the first conceptual art exhibition of its kind in Iran. I had sculptures and painted forms inspired by  Rorschach tests. I projected slides onto people and walls. I called them jinn and demons. It was part  anthropology, part philosophy, but all of it pointed to something real in the country’s air: fear and  power. 

In 2001, we had an art show in Tehran. About fifty artists. Most of them were well-known in Iran— professors and painters. But they weren’t political. They didn’t really know what conceptual art meant.  BBC World came and reported. They only showed my work. A skeleton drenched in red, a projection of  Goya and Bosch sliding over its bones. I told them it was about Wittgenstein, philosophy. But anyone  looking at it saw the truth. It was the Ayatollah, standing on blood. This was one of the most political  statements in the history of visual art.

I dreamed I was back in Evin Prison. But it was no dream. It was the wet rot of the cell pressing its truth  against my face, the number 200002 burned into my memory like the guard’s threat: forget it, and you  will be executed. In 2012, I was there. I asked them to hang me—to kill me—because death would have  

been faster. They refused mercy. Instead, they played Quran recitations on a cracked radio while  prisoners were raped. Women screamed behind the holy verses. Blood mixed with stale prayers on the  concrete floor. I saw no God in those walls, only men with appetite and power. They broke my nose. I  bled for three days without aid, tying a blanket around my head to stop the bleeding. I lost twenty kilos  in under a month. My cell was dark. Time didn’t pass—it circled me like death on a leash. I scratched a  line of Hafez onto the wall: “The roundabout didn’t go our way for two days. It shouldn’t always be the  same. Now is the time of sorrow.” 

But sorrow never ends. My crime was older than that prison. 

The walls of Evin—their damp concrete and silent screams—did not end with my release. They traveled  with me, carried invisibly but no less tangibly. Years later, on Staten Island, I found myself trapped in a  nightmare that felt like a cruel echo. The guards had changed uniforms, but their faces held the same  hunger for control. Men dressed as NYPD officers moved through the streets with the same cold eyes,  the same unforgiving gaze. It was like a dream—unbelievable and surreal—but the horror was real. 

Here, far from Tehran, Ayatollah’s soldiers walked in American blue. Their badges shone, their radios  crackled, but their hearts beat with the same brutality. They watched. They listened. They spread  slander as easily as bullets in Evin. The nightmare had not ended; it had simply worn a new mask. 

In 2022, on Staten Island, these new guards attempted to finish what was begun in Iran’s prisons. They  silenced truth, stole my work, and tried to break my spirit once more. The cells might have been  different, but the cruelty was the same. The walls of Evin stretched across continents, and the guards  wearing NYPD uniforms were their living, breathing extension. 

When my hard drive was stolen—years of photographs, documents, art destroyed—I thought about the  strange relationship between the Ayatollah’s turban and a scary vagina. What is the connection  between the sacred symbol of power wrapped around a man’s head and the nakedness of a vagina, a  symbol of life, vulnerability, and truth? Both are wielded as weapons: the turban to command  obedience, the vagina to seduce, betray, and break. The vagina becomes a site of violence, a tool of  control just like the turban is a mask for cruelty. That disturbing parallel haunts me. It is the clash of  domination and resistance, of the sacred and the profane, etched into the body and the soul. 

Kaveh Golestan, a friend and a legendary photojournalist who documented Iran’s brutal realities, was  killed for his courage to show the truth the regime wanted buried. His death haunts every frame I’ve  taken. Like him, I refuse silence. 

That same year, I wrote a play called Darkroom for a Greek festival—a meditation on suicide, on death.  Death was always my advisor. Iran’s Ministry banned the play before opening night. I was too raw for  them. But I kept going. My camera became my weapon. I photographed Tehran’s homeless, laboring  children, women torn apart by opium addiction. My first photograph was of a child sleeping beneath a  mosque wall while worshippers passed with their eyes closed. I couldn’t close mine. Because in Iran,  truth is the crime.

They threatened me with Judge Salavati, the hanging judge. My charges: insulting the Supreme Leader,  connections with Amnesty International, the UN, the CIA. My evidence: a letter to an art gallery, a  French library card. They did not want truth; they wanted confession. They called themselves Soldiers of  God while smuggling opium in prayer books, paying hush money to rapists, blinding unveiled girls with  acid, jailing women for showing hair, men for owning dogs, teenagers for having parties. They did not  punish sin; they sold it wholesale. 

In 1988, thousands were hanged. Again in 1990, underage girls were raped before execution so their  virginal souls would not reach heaven. They wrote Islam on the walls in blood. Even bricks remember.  When I finally left Iran, I thought I had escaped. I was wrong. The head of Satan is in Tehran, but its tail  coils through New York City—in universities, police stations, courtrooms, bedrooms. They no longer  break bones; they break names. 

Among those who spoke truths and paid with their lives was Mr. Zam, a courageous journalist who  revealed the regime’s darkest secrets. He was later kidnapped and executed by the Iranian regime. 

In 2025, a woman called me. She asked the same questions as the guards in Evin. Accused me of CIA ties  and UN connections. She was a honey trap, an Ayatollah prostitute, a Putin sympathizer. That’s how  these networks work. They do not need chains; they use seduction, betrayal, lawyers, universities. She  asked me to photograph her naked, to paint over her. I refused. When I saw her body, I felt nausea. I did  not want her. She recorded every word, every silence, later claiming she had slept with me when she  had not. She sought to own the narrative, to wield the accusation. The NYPD stood behind her.  Detectives feigned ignorance. They allowed her to destroy me while their superiors acted clueless. 

Staten Island became Evin rebuilt in America. In 2022, they tried to finish what they began. They stole  my hard drive, erasing years of work. They did not need to beat me; they let her lie, let her destroy my  reputation. Homeland Security interviews in 2016 recycled Evin’s script, almost verbatim. They want  submission, not truth; confession, not proof; silence. 

But I refuse. I will not disappear. I will not forget. I will testify even if it costs me everything. Because  those they killed, raped, silenced cannot speak. I will speak for them. This will be over too. 

I turned to conceptual photography to show what they did. Art became my protest. In 2017, in New  York, I had surgery to repair my nose—an attempt to undo some of their damage. I shared that photo  not for pity but as proof. 

In 2001, during Tehran’s July heat, I began photographing Wet Dream, a conceptual response to war,  terror, sex, and censorship. It began with two objects: a condom—innocuous, protective—and a bullet— cold, deadly. Their erotic tension was unmistakable. Shaped by authoritarianism, war, sexual repression,  and surveillance, every act of pleasure became political, every orgasm a protest. I imagined bullets  sleeping with each other, sex weaponized, silence turned violent, trauma leaving residues in our beds. 

I stayed outside the regime’s grasp, one of the few artists they could not buy. Ahmad Shamlou wrote: “O  foolish man, I am not your enemy. I am your denial.” I took it as my own. Refusal was my worst  punishment to them. 

In 2023, in front of the United Nations in New York City, I made a simple piece: a turban. It said  everything. Because writing about evil is easy; writing about God is safer. But writing about the 

Ayatollah—the man behind the mask—is not safe. Especially in New York, where even violent protests  trace back to him: Columbia University, Tehran-funded demonstrations, prostitution scandals, silent  assassins. 

Who protects us? Who protects Jews worldwide when the Ayatollah spent two hundred million dollars  to kill them in Argentina in 1994? There is an arrest warrant in Argentina. But he walks free. Why?  Because Khamenei was never fit to be an Ayatollah. He never finished his religious education. He was  installed overnight. Rumors swirl of a youth spent selling his flesh in a Mashhad bathhouse. His brother in-law accused him. Even his sister hates him. 

In 2019, before his kidnapping and execution, Mr. Zam told me stories about Khamenei’s hidden life.  Many knew. In Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death, but under Khamenei’s flag, anything serves if  it serves him: murder, robbery, even the sins he condemns publicly. One of his agents bragged about  sleeping with over two thousand people. Under that flag, there are no laws. Rasoul Mollagholipour, a  filmmaker, warned me, “They will kill you. You joked about him.” He said, “That man sold our soldiers to  Saddam. Saddam was a man. Khamenei is not.” Even Mohsen Rezaee’s son was killed on Khamenei’s  orders, yet Rezaee’s name appears among the architects of the Argentina attacks. 

O Bloody Dictator. O Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Cloaked in black and blood, a tyrant crowned in false  sanctity. Look upon his hands—dripping with the lifeblood of poets and children. He proclaims divine  law with an iron tongue yet shields the vile defiler of boys, blinds unveiled girls with acid, smuggles  opium in prayer books, damns sin while trafficking women, funds terror, buys foreign prostitutes. His  caliphate is built not on scripture but on chains, prisons, and bones. 

In Evin I scratched Hafez on the wall: This will be over too. I will not forget Zahra Kazemi, the women  screaming behind Quran recitations, the students, the seventeen-year-olds, the neighbors who never  returned, the artists, the photographers, the ones who resisted. There are no monuments for them. So  this is mine. They tried to sculpt pain into surrender. They failed. 

I am a photographer. A witness. A survivor. From Shush Street in Tehran to Broadway in NYC, my  mission remains. Even if I publish alone, even if no one listens. Because truth lives in every frame. Mercy  to the people of Iran. A story they tried to erase. These images are voices—not terrorists, but artists,  children, homeless, mothers—simply, human beings. If the world truly cares about us, it must stop  seeing us as headlines and start seeing us as neighbors. 

I have documented forty-five years of pain. They tried to erase me. But I am still here. Scanning thirty five rolls of 35-millimeter film. Some appeared on World Press Photo. Others may never be seen. But I  go on.

David De Hannay

David De Hannay is a multidisciplinary artist—painter, photographer, filmmaker, author, performer, poet, curator, and human rights activist. He is the founder of the NYC Art Movement, an initiative that documented over 120 mural street artists during COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, organizing one of New York’s largest art shows in 2020.

His conceptual work has been featured on BBC World News, and his films and books explore the intersections of art, cinema, and politics. Recent projects include Libre Monijara (2025), a documentary on Colombian-American artist Monijara; JLG in NYC, a feature inspired by Jean-Luc Godard; and an anthropological documentary on Astor Barbershop, the oldest in New York City.

As an author, De Hannay has published multiple books blending poetry, philosophy, and resistance, including Haikus of the Cock (2025) and Guillotine in NYC (2025). An advocate for human rights for nearly two decades, he has produced documentary anthologies across Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and the United States. He studied art and psychology at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he earned his degree in Fine Arts.