For once, it is not a well-known photographer who has the honor of gracing the poster of the Perpignan International Festival of Photojournalism, in the south of France, which is celebrating its 35^th edition this year. The image is by an anonymous amateur and is even of poor quality. "The printers weren't very happy with my choice," said festival director Jean-François Leroy, who insisted on the image, emblematic of the popular uprising that has been shaking Iran since autumn 2022. It shows, from behind, a young woman without a veil, her hair blowing in the wind. Standing on the roof of a car, she looks out at a stream of thousands of people who have come to commemorate Mahsa Amini, who died on September 16, 2022, after being arrested by the morality police for what was deemed inappropriate dress. "For me, this uprising is the event of the year, and this image has the force of a document," continued the director. "It moves me. The substance is worth more than the form."

In fact, an entire exhibition, opening on Saturday, September 2 under the title "Tu ne meurs pas" ("You won't die"), is dedicated to photos and videos from Iran, mostly taken by amateurs and anonymous people − a rarity in the temple of arthouse photojournalism. The documents were patiently selected by two Le Monde journalists, Marie Sumalla and Ghazal Golshiri, and published on Le Monde's website. At the time, these images were the only way to shed light on the popular movement in a country where there is no free media or access for foreign journalists, and where the regime stifles all signs of opposition. "Le Monde doesn't employ local photographers in Iran because it's too dangerous," said Golshiri, who grew up in Tehran, and was the newspaper's correspondent in Iran from 2016 to 2019, when she left the country for fear of imprisonment.

After Amini's death, Golshiri saw her Iranian friends and contacts bear witness to unprecedented acts of rebellion against the regime: going out into the streets without the Islamic headscarf, gatherings at the cemetery, demonstrations, etc. "We wanted to tell the story of the uprising without knowing if it was a revolution," said Sumalla, a photo editor who knows Iran well. But when she went looking for images to illustrate it, "there was nothing in the agencies, apart from images fabricated by the regime," she said. "And we quickly realized that the most spectacular photos and videos were on social media."

Living, raw material

What could be done with this abundant, living but raw, unidentified material from all over the country? The two journalists decided to team up with Farzad Seifikaran and Payam Elhami, an investigative journalist and an Iranian data specialist who, since the 2019 protests, have been collecting the photos and videos that leave the country, sourcing them, geolocating them, verifying them and distributing them.

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