Book excerpt: Telex : Iran is an extraordinarily personal document of a public event. The photographs Gilles Peress took over a five-week period during the 1979/80 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran form neither a study nor an analysis. Peress didn't plan to go to Iran: the instant imagery, the caricatures of "fanatics" on his TV got to him. He felt the need to understand for himself the apparent madness about which the Western media could only generalize