Images from the Iranian Revolution

NYU’s Grey Art Gallery is showing some of its photos and posters from the Iranian Revolution in Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture.

“While the posters were produced by a wide range of political groups, most make direct appeals to action by defying power, subverting authority, and inverting icons as a means to authorize oppositional ways of thinking and behavior....

As social discontent increased throughout the 1970s, some of Iran’s leading contemporary artists assumed an active role in the production of political posters. Inspired by the French student movement of 1968, a group of Iranian artists opened a workshop at the University of Tehran in 1978. The workshop provided the materials and equipment for printing posters to members of various political groups. Professional artists worked alongside amateurs. Their results were displayed throughout Tehran — in schools, in factories, and on the walls of other buildings, often defacing public monuments built by the Pahlavi regime as symbols of its authority and grandeur. As government agents tore them down or covered them with paint, protesters would replace them with replenished supplies.”

The show juxtaposes some modern painting and sculpture from Iran in the 1960s and ’70s.

See other photos, murals and posters from Staging Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Annotation but no thumbnails at the last link, just keep clicking ‘next image.’)

More posters (with a nice thumbnail index) at islamicdigest.net.

Grey link found via American Samizdat.