Mira Xenia Schwerda

"Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran" is the first book-length study on the art and visual culture of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) when photography played a critical role in defining, mobilizing, and memorializing political movements and their leaders in an era of spectacle. Based on a large body of unpublished visual sources and extensive Persian language textual sources, this project examines the aesthetic and artistic innovations which contributed to Constitutionalist image making and revolutionary portraiture. The book focuses on the impact of photography on revolution and political change in modern Iran; a topic, as recent protests in Iran have shown, that remains relevant.