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‘The ruins of Rey are near Tehran!’ exclaimed the wayfarers in Sadegh Hedayat’s dark, opium-incensed novel of 1936, The Blind Owl The fabled city of Rey, razed to the ground by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, is only a short distance from the Iranian capital of Tehran During Hedayat’s lifetime, and in the heady decades leading up to the 1979 Revolution, there were lesser known ruins even closer to home Ruins brushed beneath the bloodstained rug of the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, invisible to the foreign diplomats, heads of state, and celebrities surrounding him, and to the affluent denizens of Tehran’s leafy northern suburbs Shahr-e No (literally, ‘New City’) was a decrepit red light district, and a thorn in the side of a monarch with a penchant for bubbly, caviar, and Warhol To some, places like Shahr-e No were a fact of life, a part of their quotidian existence on the margins of society Others didn’t know they existed at all, and many of those who did, in the spirit of the Pahlavi era, denied such realities with vehemence   Kaveh Golestan was not among their number In the early seventies, while in his twenties, he spent a number of years visiting Shahr-e No, striking up a rapport with its inhabitants Later, between 1975 and 1977, he captured the prostitutes who lived and worked there, in a series of photographs currently on view at Tate Modern’s Boiler House The exhibition is notable for the importance of Golestan’s documentary work – it is also the first time an entire room at Tate Modern has been dedicated to the work of an Iranian artist As well as the women of Shar-e No, the neighbourhood itself is also on display In a vitrine, a map shows a district surrounded on all sides by walls, so as not to prove an eyesore In Golestan’s photographs, the streets are filthy and bare, lined by brick apartment buildings, little aqueducts, and weary merchants   Golestan was part of a small group of intellectuals and artists keenly aware of the disparities between the social strata in Iran