A Thousand Words.(The Talk of the Town)(photograph by Jahangir Razmi)

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, keeps four prize-winning photographs on the wall above his desk. One is of Babe Ruth's farewell, at Yankee Stadium; another shows Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower walking together at Camp David; a third depicts the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima; and the last, taken in 1979, shows the execution of eleven men by a firing squad, at close range--an iconic distillation of the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. "It haunted me as I sat there at my desk day after day," Gissler said recently of the image. For twenty-seven years, the photographer's identity was unknown; the Iranian newspaper Ettela'at, when it published the image, withheld attribution out of concern for his safety. The shot remains the only anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer in the ninety-year history of the prizes.

The photographer's name, we now know, is Jahangir Razmi. His identity was uncovered last December, with his permission, by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Joshua Prager, and the Pulitzer board decided to credit Razmi formally at its awards ceremony, last week, with a ten-thousand-dollar prize. For the occasion, Razmi, who is fifty-nine, and his wife, Parvin, made their first trip to the United States. After landing at J.F.K., they visited the United Nations and the Brooklyn Bridge, window-shopped on Fifth Avenue, and stopped at the Chase branch on Broadway at 109th Street to cash their winnings, posing for pictures with the chief teller. (The United States and Iran do not share banking relations, so cashing the check in Tehran might have been complicated.) After a while, Parvin asked, "Where's all the fruit in this country?" They added Fairway to their itinerary.

On the eve of the Pulitzer ceremony, Prager organized a dinner party in the Razmis' honor, at the penthouse apartment of a friend, the philanthropist Greg Carr. There Razmi met Monir Nahid, a Kurdish woman whose two sons were among the eleven victims Razmi documented, and who in the aftermath of the shootings had used the photograph to rally for an independent Kurdistan, before escaping to Germany, in the fall of 1979. (She now lives in Los Angeles.) Razmi and Nahid embraced and, ...