Reza Deghati’s photographs tell stories that echo one another. They begin in Iran, where he was born, and travel on through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, India, and the Caucasus. They are pictures of friendly faces in soft colours, images as tender as a sweet caress.

Deghati, the exile, the unhappy lover of the country of his birth, a country from which he has been banned for 25 years, a man bathed in poetry and philosophy, could talk for hours about these people, whose languages and cultures he’s traversed for years. By telling stories to others, he recounts his own tale -- the tale of a child fascinated from an early age by the concept of social commitment.

He starts with his childhood. The young Deghati quickly learned to listen. He recited the verses of Sa’adi; he selected a few poems, invented a story, and created his first magazine full of dreams: Parvaz. The life story he chose to tell was that of an old lady he met in the port city of Bandar Abbas. She was one of those people you meet by chance -- a fishmonger like so many others, but a person who was, in spite of that, destined to seal his fate. "What do you want from me? You’re taking photographs of my face and you don’t even know me. Sit down now and listen. If you want to take photos of me, you must first learn who I am." So the young Reza sat down beside the withered old woman and her rancid tub of fish. She told him her life story, talked to him about her dead children, her unconditional obedience to the government, and her mistreatment at the hands of the Royal Police who visited her everyday to take a cut of her meagre earnings.

Deghati, the exile, continues his struggle because, as he says, "You always fight harder for what you love." He likes to feel like an insider, able to melt away into the background. He’s an Afghan with a woolen pakol on his head, wearing a traditional shalwar. He’s a Saudi in a jalabbiyeh. He’s a Caucasian in a Gulag prisoner’s jacket. He’s an Egyptian, a Turkmen, a Pashtun, a Tajik. When Deghati walked in the mountains of the Panjshir Valley for three months, Ahmad Shah Massoud - the man who had been in hiding for three years - gave him all his trust. His portraits of Massoud are infused with the power of friendship and respect. In that regard, they are similar to the portraits of Benazir Bhutto whom he followed throughout her struggle. But as soon as she was elected the prime minister of Pakistan, he told her that their roads would diverge: "I can’t photograph someone who holds political power. That’s not my story."

Deghati is a photographer of the intimate. He is the portraitist of remarkable people as well as of the oppressed and the anonymous, whom he depicts with all the fervour of a convinced humanist. Deghati was the creative director of National Geographic’s most viewed documentary Inside Mecca. His life and work have been the subject of many a film aired on National Geographic Television, one of which won an Emmy Award in 2002. For his humanitarian work, in 2006, National Geographic awarded him the title of National Geographic Fellow.

Deghati’s photographs have been displayed in major cities throughout the globe. These include War + Peace (2009) at Caen Memorial Peace Museum in Normandy, One World, One Tribe (2006) in Washington D.C., and Crossing Destinies (2003) in Paris. Among the long list of awards and honours, he’s the recipient of Chevalier de l’Ordre  National du Merite, the highest civil award in France, and in 2008 he became a senior fellow of the Ashoka Foundation. He is currently working in Burkina Faso and in Librino in Sicily with groups of local inhabitants.

Excerpts from a conversation that took place at Avari Hotel in Lahore where he was invited by LLF 2016, follow:

The News on Sunday (TNS): Let’s journey back into time. When was your first experience of taking a picture?

Reza Deghati (RD): I didn’t take to photography because I loved photography.  Once upon a time, when I was merely nine-years-old, I saw a group of children at school gathered around a door. When I went ahead to see what was happening, I saw them pushing a young boy out of the school. The boy must be nine -- about the same age as me. He was barefoot, and looked like a beggar. He was crying, and I could hear him wail: "I just want to see what a school looks like!" The children at school, even the guards, kept pushing him out, chanting: "No, you just can’t come in!" I remember I was so touched by the sight that I tried to bring him in. The same kids beat me up.

This remained on my mind for days on end. "Why can’t all children go to school?" "Why do we have barefoot children around us?" I asked myself. I was a child then, living with my family. Ever since if I would see a child or a woman begging for help, it would touch my heart. For me, it was not ‘normal’.

I thought people should do something about it but then I realised, people are too busy milling around, they don’t even see it. When I turned eleven, I asked myself: How can I show it to them? I had no idea of photography at that time. So I started to draw -- barefoot children, et al. I started to share my drawings with friends and family members but, obviously, since I was not an artist, nobody took me seriously. I soon realised I can’t do it.

My father had a little box camera that he used for taking family pictures on vacations. When I was 13, I started to look through it -- I learnt that when you look through a square and move it, you can see the people in front of you. My question was: If that’s art, it can’t always be about taking our own pictures; rather, it could be anybody in front of the camera. That was the beginning. The reason why I wanted to learn to take pictures is not because I loved the camera or the pictures or wanted to make art. This was the tool through which I could show ‘reality’ to the world.

TNS: Once you had had the first encounter with the camera, how did your interest in it develop?

RD: I had no idea about the camera -- the integers, the ASA, the shutter speed, and so on. There was nobody around to help. So it was through long difficult years of struggle that I came to learn its dynamics. Then, I had no money to process the films. I would go to portrait studios like the ones you have in every city. Standing there, at the entrance without even stepping in, I would wait for the photographer to come out whom I could ask: "Could you please tell me how to process a film?" I would listen up and ‘try’ to understand what a fixer and a developer does. It was all about chemicals, and at the end, I still had no money. I would pause to think before opening my mouth: "Excuse me! What do you do with the chemicals once you’re done processing? Could you please give them to me rather than throw them away?"

My first few films were ruined because those studios would exhaust their chemicals before throwing them. It took me a couple of years to learn the technology in Tabriz, Iran.

TNS: You were trained to become an architect by qualification at the University of Tehran. How did you decide to take on photography, instead, as a profession or a career?

RD: In those days, as I am sure even now, all the parents wanted their children to become either doctors or engineers. Even though photography had become my passion and I was taking pictures every single day, the reason I chose photography is because, as I told you, every time I would see injustice, it would move me. In those days when I was studying architecture, there was a lot of social injustice, and the secret police, Komite, was very strong in Iran.

By the age of 19, I had created a small darkroom at home; printing pictures myself with enlargers et al. I was photographing hidden poverty; hiding the camera in my shirt, I would venture out at night, sometimes in the university robe, and take down notes of what I saw happening in villages with hungry people. But this was 40 years ago -- probably, one of the first uses of an image for political ends but I was only 20 and had no idea that this could be such a huge indicator to the government at the top and to the police. I was arrested and jailed for three years. I was badly tortured because for ‘them’ this could only be a job for an organised gang, not just a single individual’s undertaking. For ‘them’ it was impossible to believe that I could do it ‘alone’. "Who’s in command of you?" "Who are the perpetrators?" It was all ‘my’ work but they didn’t understand that and didn’t even want to. I was 23-years-old by then, and those three years behind bars brought me up to understand that a photograph has more power than anything else. Once I was released, I continued my studies. The Revolution started, and I have no idea how I became a professional photographer.

One day in my office I told my co-workers that I wanted to take three days off - there was a demonstration that I wanted to capture. Those three days went by followed by another day, followed by yet another and another until 30 years went by, and they are still waiting for me to return to the office.

TNS: Why do you think people are afraid of the image? In today’s digital age, it’s become increasingly facile to contrive, fabricate or manipulate images to create ‘alternative’ realities.

RD: First of all, the technology of ‘creating’ and/or ‘constructing’ images came with the very invention of image making. Even 100 years ago, you could find pictures that were collaged. This possibility has been there from the beginning of photography. A good example is a photograph of the October Revolution in 1917 in Moscow. It’s a picture of Lenin talking to people around him. Many of those people were not well-received and were killed; every time you saw the photograph, you found a slain revolutionary missing. After 5-10 years, Lenin could be seen standing alone when originally, there were 12 people around him. The altering of images has always been there.

The fact that people are afraid of images leads on to my experience of photographing them, and I have found that there are two types of people: the first type is afraid of images for religious reasons. Some religions say that a photograph is a creation, and no man can ever be a creator. God is the only creator.

In a similar line of belief in religion, the second type believes that when you take a picture, you actually take the soul out of them, like the Native Americans and African tribes.

But what’s happening today is that people across the world are afraid of the image. I tried to understand ‘Why?’ It took me back to the same old belief of the soul being seized but somehow people are also afraid because they fear their ugliness might be revealed through a photograph. Whether it’s individuals or governments, people who are afraid of a photograph are people who have something to hide.

TNS: There was a series of photographs called ‘Childhood Promise’ featuring your son Dil Azad Deghati. What was that all about?

RD: I was travelling for 8-9 months a year. My children, when they were two-or three-years old, would run after me, crying for attention. One day, I found my son hiding away in the suitcase as an act of resistance. On another occasion, he came with a copy of the National Geographic in hand, and explained: "I’ve learnt how to put pictures in a magazine. You have to take me with you." He took up a film roll, put it in the magazine and proclaimed: "See, I know how to put pictures in a magazine!" This went on until he was three. One day I sat him down for a hard talk. He said he wanted to go everywhere, especially to places that he wished to choose. "If you stop crying, I’ll take you wherever you want when you are 15-years-old," I promised him. He went home and started to put dots on the map, already planning his trip.

When he turned 15, I put everything aside, ready to leave. The plan was to travel for two months, starting off with Beijing, on a shoestring budget with a backpack, one small camera and two video cameras. We travelled on third-grade trains and stayed in hotels without a star rating before coming back home to Paris.

My son was writing a blog every day about the happenings. Four days later, National Geographic picked the blog and put it on its website. Meanwhile a French publisher read the blog and offered a contract for a book. So, here I was, travelling with my son who got a book contract. We gave the video footage to National Geographic that made a series of five 30-minute films that ran on their channel.

TNS: How did National Geographic come to learn about you?

RD: National Geographic is a non-profit organisation. For it, photography is the only thing that has value. People who take care of it keep an eye on other magazines; attend festivals and exhibitions to look out for talent. On the other hand, they receive a lot of stories and resumes aspiring to be published. People who are in charge of photography often go around picking photographers.

Back in the 1980s when I was working for Time magazine - I was one of the top news photographers - National Geographic had seen my work. At that time, there were four or five photographers other than myself working for Time, such as James Nachtway and Christopher Anderson.

In 1990 I quit photography when I was offered a job at the United Nations (UN). I was doing photography to help out people by garnering the attention of non-profits and the UN. Now when the UN itself sought my help, I thought why go back to photojournalism?

One day I was in the high mountains of Badakhshan, Afghanistan, in my UN vehicle when I received a message on radio. (There were no satellite phones in the 1990s). Someone from the UN had called Kabul looking for me. He was the Director of Photography from the National Geographic with a job offer for me. I declined the offer immediately, saying I had no interest in it. This was the first time they contacted me. I continued to work for the UN.

One year later, at a high-level UN meeting in Genève, I was talking to my colleagues about Afghanistan. One of the senior officials asked me why I was working in Afghanistan when I was a well-established photographer. He said he had seen my picture six years ago in Time, and it touched him enough to become a die-hard advocate of the Afghan cause. I thought if I could touch people’s hearts with my photographs, I should get back to photography. In any case, I had decided after a year that the UN was not such a good place to work, and I didn’t want to spend my entire life working with them. I resigned from the UN, and went back home to Paris where I had no job. I found a note sitting on my desk from the same gentleman from National Geographic. They invited me to Washington D. C. for negotiations. My first assignment was a story on Cairo.

TNS: Your work has always had a humanitarian edge. Whose work had you been looking at for inspiration?

RD: If you are asking about the humanitarian inspiration, the answer is none. When I started out my first training sessions in refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1983, none of the photographers was doing anything of the sort. Even now, no other photographer is doing the kind of humanitarian work that I do -- it’s totally different. For instance, what Sebastião Salgado does is different: he returned to his homeland, found his parent farm which had been destroyed, and created a non-profit to collect funds to plant trees on his fatherland.  I am training children, getting disenfranchised females registered, and helping the refugee population because I believe they are my fatherland. The Kurdish refugees who I’ve been training are my fatherland.

One of the important facts is that photographers who claim to do humanitarian work do not use their own income. They get donations. I use my income to buy cameras, take pictures, publish books, and with the revenue they generate, buy cameras for these people. The whole cycle is different.

TNS: What exactly led to the making of the book The Soul of Coffee?

RD: I try to connect people through photography. In Europe and America everybody consumes coffee the way tea is consumed here. If you ask them who brings this coffee to them, they wouldn’t know. I decided to photograph in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, India, Sudan and Ethiopia - countries that majorly produce coffee - concentrating on the farmers’ portraits. For instance, there’s a portrait of a woman with stitch marks on her face. It was not just about making a book but also about exhibiting those images. I tried to build bridges between people using a daily commodity.

TNS: Tell us about founding the agency Webistan, and concurrently about AINA.

RD: Whatever you do, you need a structure for it, especially in today’s time and age. If you want to build a house, you need a special structure; you wish to make furniture, you need a company that excels in it, and so forth. The structure I needed for my work formalised into a photo agency; 1992 was the beginning of the Internet. When it came to finding a name for it, since I was working in countries that had ‘stan’ attached to their first names as a suffix, I decided to join it to the Web, and call it Webistan.

I began AINA because as I was working on the humanitarian front parallel to photography, I felt Afghanistan needed a proper non-profit, and that I should create it. In this way, I would be able to train women in media and journalism. I was thinking what would be the best name for it. The first thing under consideration was names with a resonance in the local language that people could understand. I did not want to choose a foreign name like ‘Care’, for instance. When you write ‘Care’ in Darri, it has a totally different meaning for the Afghans. So I picked up ‘Aina’ which means ‘mirror’.