An ‘eye for an eye’ is a common expression used to describe retaliation. At times signifying a cautionary tale, at others a maxim, it reverberates throughout the world in daily speech and religious and legal texts. The earliest use of the term dates to around 1790 BC in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. In Islamic Sharia law, the concept is called ‘qisas.’ It can be interpreted as a “retribution in kind.” In the instance of murder, a victim’s family can ask, with the permission of the court, for a sentence of execution; a life for a life. And for a handful of countries across the world—Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and parts of northern Nigeria—some form of qisas is included in their legal system.
For Iranian photographer Enayat Asadi, qisas was the starting point of his most difficult project to date. In his powerful, challenging series Survivors of Death Row, Asadi traveled the country, photographing men who had escaped execution. “Iran is one of the few countries where capital punishment is practiced broadly and consistently by the judicial system as retribution, rooted in the Islamic canon of law. Yet the same judicial system strives, sometimes, to save the convicts from death,” he explains.
The seeds of Asadi’s project were planted long ago in his youth. Where Asadi became an electrical engineer before turning to photography, his friends, Abbas and Mazaher, found themselves on very different paths. Mazaher killed a man during a carjacking. Abbas shot a shop owner in a robbery and was executed within a month—hanged in a football stadium, watched by thousands of spectators. Mazaher would go on to spend seven years on death row before he was executed; his family unable to raise the money for ‘diya.’
In Iran, the qisas principle allows the family of a murder victim to seek the death penalty in kind or as an alternative to forgive the accused and request diya, which translates to “blood money” or “ransom.” Asadi points out that the official government rate for diya for an adult male is roughly $18,000 USD, but families can ask for any amount they want; this happens in a country where the GDP per capita in 2020 was only around $2,756. Social workers and judicial officers may also attempt to persuade family members to forfeit the right to qisas on moral beliefs. While offenders wait in prison, a death sentence looms on the horizon.
The fate of his friends from adolescence would surface years after Asadi had left the engineering field and committed himself to photography in 2017. He had photographed Afghan refugees and nomadic Bakhtiari women, his photographs published around the world. In 2021 he found himself in conversation with a prison social worker.
“He spoke of the trauma of mock executions, of sentences changed at the last minute when nooses had already been tied around necks. He described the ad hoc methods of murder: men hanged from trees and basketball hoops when proper equipment was unavailable,” Asadi says. “The social worker explained how he and prison guards mediated between the inmates and the families of those their inmates had killed, trying to convince them to forgive, to accept blood money. Even senior prison officials fought to save prisoners from death. After this conversation, I decided it was time to face my past.”
Asadi’s black and white portraits are haunting. They capture men who appear to live in a form of limbo, saved from death but not necessarily welcomed back to the land of the living. Reflecting on encountering his subjects, Asadi describes the experience by quoting the late French filmmaker and writer Chris Marker, “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything—except wounds.” The toll of prison, the guilt of a crime, and the uncertainty of when a death sentence might come to fruition, gnaws away at a person.
Yet the same must be said for the victims’ families. How does one comprehend and come to terms with the violent murder of a loved one? How does one choose to forgive? Asadi includes the details of his subjects’ actions, the violence of their crimes leading to the dissonance of these portraits—men in pain when they have also inflicted so much pain unto others. He does not turn away from the emotional complexity of the situation, forcing the viewer to confront it too. Asadi’s photographs ask their audience to take in both words and images, both action and reaction.
The more he photographed, the more Asadi realized that his subjects did not like to be seen at all. Separated from family, isolated from society, and marked by their pasts, these men shrink from the light. Many of the portraits feature some form of abstraction; light reflected through glass, the softening raindrops on a car window, a turned back, coins placed over eyes. In others, a sense of distance is invoked; a barrier of smoke and flames, a man standing as if on the gallows.
Reflecting this longing for invisibility in form, it is hard to get a full look at many of the photographer’s subjects. These are images made quickly, in the time he was permitted. Asadi describes the difficult circumstances of meeting his subjects. “They are not at all interested in having a long conversation about the days they were waiting to die and their past. Many times remembering the past through the conversation made them angry, cry, and feel stressed.”
The story of Mehdi, pictured with his arms flung back and eyes closed, was deeply influential for Asadi. Leaving a party at the age of 22 with his pregnant wife, he had an altercation with a motorcyclist, who he proceeded to kill. Over the course of 13 years he was put on death row three times. On the day of his execution, he was forgiven by the victim’s family after a diya payment was finally arranged, telling Asadi, “Moments before the execution, I wished time would stop and the clock would not move. Whenever I see an iron stool, I still fear and remember the moments of my execution.” Whilst in prison his wife left him and his son was raised by grandparents. Visiting his father in prison, Mehdi’s son had told him, “I want to break the glass between us with a stone and set you free.”
Freedom is a slippery concept. What does it mean personally, emotionally, physically, and conceptually? Throughout Asadi’s portraits one may ask, What freedom have these men found? What freedom have their victims’ families located? The specter of execution may be gone but what kind of life can be lived afterwards?
For Asadi, one of the most important things is “to put ourselves in each other’s shoes so that we can better find answers to these questions. While working on this project, I realized concretely that man is afraid of everything that is unknown to him. Death is one of the most important and thought-provoking issues that has involved the mind since the beginning of human life. And now imagine that this death is not done by accident or disease but with awareness. This is the worst kind of death.”
Wherever one might fall on the topic of prison, punishment, justice, it is hard not to see the work of Enayat Asadi and be reminded that that age-old adage of an ‘eye for an eye’ has an ending. That retaliation, retribution, the taking of one for another creates more victims in its wake, more suffering, and ultimately leaves the whole world blind.
