Iran in pictures: social suffering & 3 sets of images

A short talk by Negar Azimi
Language: English

The talk will explore three distinctly iconic images drawn from Iran: the cover of the July 17, 1999 issue of the economist magazine; an image of two young men about to be publicly hanged in the town of Mashhad, ostensibly for being gay; and the video image of a young woman shot to death in the street during the post-election uprisings of 2009. All three sets of images are documents of human rights abuses of one sort or another, and each was—following its initial circulation—disseminated en masse in the print press, but even more prominently on the internet. This abridged talk explores the content of those images, but also how their particular introduction and their subsequent circulation have informed our understanding of the narratives they have purported to represent and, more broadly, our understanding of human rights abuses that take place in faraway lands.