Advertising in Iranian newspapers was a new phenomenon in the late 1920s. Advertisements introduced Iranians to some other new phenomena such as cars, radio, instant cameras, and the European-style outfit that revolutionized how Iranians lived and interacted with each other. The ads here are selected from the newspapers published between 1926 to 1931.
This house near Ferdowsi Square was built by the Russian architect Alexander Belyn in 1938. Belyn was working for Kampsax - a Danish construction company founded in 1917 which had several projects in Iran, including the construction of 900 km of cross-country railroads.
Three photographs of Armenian families, most likely taken to be attached to travel documents. The photographs were taken in Isfahan by Minas Patkerhanian Machertich in 1920s-1930s.
The ancient city of Bushehr on the Persian gulf, also known as "Bushire" in English, used to be a prosperous and active port for centuries, especially during the 19th century. But by the 1930s the city declined in importance, and many of its buildings were abandoned. The photos here, taken in the early 1970s, show the last remains of Bushehr's traditional architecture.
In May 1887, the American periodical “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine” published an article about a trip from Tehran to Baghdad. The following images are from that article and show the outfits of Iranian women in that period. The photographs show the clothing of different minorities, as well as outfits for indoor and outdoor use and the different seasons.
Lady Cockroach is a short play for children published in 1929 in the city of Shiraz, Iran. According to the cover, the author Mirza Jabbar Askarzadeh (often known as Jabbar Baghtcheban) was the head-teacher of a kindergarten in Shiraz. He later established the first Iranian kindergarten for the deaf, and was the inventor of Persian cued speech.
Pre-Nowruz shopping on Vali-Asr avenue in Tehran, between two important intersections, the intersection of Vali-asr and Jomhouri avenues and the intersection of Valiasr and Enqelab avenues. March 17, 2016.
At the turn of the 20th century, in the popular art and media of the “West,” the "Middle East" was depicted as a mysterious, exotic region. Cliched images such as camels, deserts, half-naked dancing women, and buildings with minarets and domes were ubiquitous in illustrating anything related to Iran or the Middle East.
