The Former Embassy of Iran in Washington, D.C. is located at 3003-3005 Massachusetts Avenue, in Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row neighbourhood. Withdrawn, silent, and inaccessible it has been closed since the fall of the Shah, and the US embassy hostage crisis of 1979.
The Blind Owl (1937) is Sadegh Hedayat’s most enduring work of prose and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Written in Persian, it tells the story of a young man’s despair after losing a mysterious lover. As the narrator gradually drifts into madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat’s bleak vision of the human condition.
Sani-al-Mulk’s illustrations for “One thousand and One nights” – (c. 1853).
Mirza Abol-Hassan Khan Ghaffari Kashani, also known as ‘Abol-Hassan the Second’ and ‘Sani-al-Mulk’, is considered the first teacher of European style of painting in Iran.
Photos from old government buildings of Rasht, the largest city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast. Almost all the buildings are still standing, but some of them with different names from the past. For example, today “The hospital building Baladieh” is known as “Municipal Building No. 2”.
* Images provided by Damon Moradi.
It is becoming very common to see defaced Iranian banknotes. There are so many in circulations with rubber stamps or even printed personal slogans and messages on them. According to Iranian Central Bank, the life span of a banknote is about 5 years, while in other countries it is about 10 years.
Akhbar magazine (meaning “News”) was a monthly magazine published by the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Iran.
These pages are from issues number 5 and 6, published in May and June of 1980 and have been provided by Mehrdad Kashani.
Edmund Joseph Sullivan (1869-1933), was a British book illustrator who worked in a style which merged the British tradition of illustration from the 1860s with aspects of Art Nouveau.
Later in his career, he illustrated the First Version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald, using images of skeletons and animated pots.
The painter and Illustrator Mohammad Tajvidi was born in 1925. After completing his studies at the School of National Arts, he took the position of assistant professor at the school. He was promoted to a senior professorship continued teaching until 1963.
Later he started making illustrations for hundreds of books. He died in Tehran in 1995 at the age of 70.
A collection of photos of young and up-and-coming artists in the 1969 Yearbook of Ettelaat.
Iranian popular music changed most radically in the 1960s, when it shifted from the traditional to the western style that would dominate the 1970s. Faegheh Atashin, most famously known as Googoosh, is one of the major contributors to the western style of pop music. Originally pressed on the vinyl format in 1960s and 1970s, her songs and performances were banned after the Iranian revolution of 1979 but her music preserved via the cassettes in the 1980s and CDs in the 1990s in diaspora. Here are her vinyl record covers mainly from 1970s.
