Photographic Motifs in Kapuściński's Shah of Shahs

Author: Izabela Koczkodaj

Shah of Shahs belongs among Kapuściński’s most formally distinctive works. The book’s second chapter, entitled “Daguerreotypes,” consists of a series of photographic descriptions — vivid, still images that Kapuściński constructs from memory, imagination, and journalistic observation.

The scholarly article by Izabela Koczkodaj examines the photographic motifs running through Shah of Shahs as a structural and semantic device. Photography is not merely a metaphor here: Kapuściński physically browses through photographs while writing, and these photographs — their faces, gestures, and frozen moments — become the organising principle of his narrative.

Word and Image

Kapuściński uses the static, fragmentary nature of photography to contrast with the chaotic, fast-moving events of the Iranian revolution. Where the revolution is noise, movement, and mass — the photographic frame is silence, stillness, and the individual face.

The “daguerreotype” as a historical form of photography is itself significant: it implies age, imprecision, a certain blurring of memory. Kapuściński’s daguerreotypes are not sharp documentary records but subjective imprints — images filtered through the reporter’s consciousness.

The Shah and Power

The photographs of the Shah become one of the central motifs. Kapuściński describes how photographs of the Shah were everywhere in Iran — in offices, shops, homes — and how, as the revolution progressed, they were torn down and destroyed. The destruction of the Shah’s image becomes a physical enactment of the revolution itself.

Iran and Poland

Koczkodaj’s analysis also touches on the allegorical dimension noted by many readers: how the photographic motifs allow Kapuściński to universalise the Iranian experience. The frozen faces of revolutionary committees, the destroyed portraits of tyrants — these are images that resonate far beyond Iran in the early 1980s.

Conclusion

The article was published in the literary journal Akcent and represents an early academic engagement with the formal properties of Kapuściński’s prose — a body of scholarship that has grown substantially since his death in 2007.

source: kapuscinski.info