Clickbait orientalism and vintage Iranian snapshots

Orientalism, mediawork and the weaponization of diasporic self-representation

Over the course of three centuries, the discourse of orientalism has been organized by Western knowledge producers around a set of epistemological and ontological binaries between East and West (Orient and Occident): the irrational, feminized, timeless and exotic (Middle) Eastern “Other” as radically different from and inferior to the rational, masculine, and dynamic West (Said, 1978). Edward Said’s groundbreaking work sparked a lively debate among critics, including those who argued he presented a reductive and totalizing analysis that relied too heavily on 19th-century literary sources. But the dynamism of orientalism as a discourse is evident in the continued spread of its classical tropes in new media and in the enduring power of its representations: new cultural forms continue to contribute to and perpetuate orientalist discourses well into the 21st century. This resiliency has led Ali Behdad and other theorists to conclude that, “Orientalism is not a single and unchanging entity whose totalizing impulse leaves little room for discursive and ideological transformation,” but rather a complex network of power relations that “always entails re-articulations of otherness to ensure its cultural hegemony in the face of complex political and social change” (Behdad, 2016: 168).

One way that this dynamism can be seen is through a theoretical framework Hamid Naficy (1995) has called the mediawork about the Middle East in the West. Used to describe the work of signifying institutions such as mass media and pop culture that act as agents for hegemonic ideologies, one key characteristic of mediawork is that it “reformats or disguises” the dominant ideologies latent in its representations. This enables the maintenance of hegemonic consensus about the Middle East as though it were everyday common sense rather than “a self-contained set of ‘political opinions’ or ‘biased views’” (Naficy, 1995: 74). Distributed globally, Western mediawork closely connects entertainment with power as orientalist ideologies are normalized and expressed through media to legitimize political and military agendas.

Among the enduring discursive moves that animate these re-articulations are assumptions of Western moral and cultural superiority and the persistence of binary logics. These binaries especially permeate North American and European cultural forms used as soft power in the Middle East, both by governments through public and cultural diplomacy, and by non-state actors like media organizations, non-profits, and corporations. ⁵ Such efforts aim to persuade Middle Easterners of Western superiority through music, film, radio, and satellite TV (Aidi, 2014; Edwards, 2015; Sreberny and Torfeh, 2014) while concurrent efforts work to convince Americans of the inferiority of Middle Eastern and Muslim cultural characteristics through film and television, news media, and literature (Alsultany, 2012; Fayyaz and Shirazi, 2013; Said, 1997; Whitlock, 2007).

With the spread of globalization and the appearance of “democratized” digital media platforms, voices from the Middle East and its diasporas have broadened the representations available to Western audiences. Over the last two decades a swell of books, videos, art, and online publications have been produced by diasporic Iranians and other Middle Easterners – especially women – who aim in part to correct the misrepresentations of the Middle East in Western mediawork. These works have tended to (re-)circulate via traditional and social media at moments of heightened geopolitical tension, for example during the 2015 negotiation of the “Iran Deal” or the January 2020 military escalations between Iran and the United States.

However, many of these widely disseminated efforts at recalibrating the Western imagination of the Middle East have been charged by critics (often within the same diaspora) with creating Othering representations of Islam and affirming orientalist tropes of oppressed veiled women (Bahramitash, 2005; Rastegar, 2006). Further complicating matters, Middle Eastern cultural producers who do not prioritize Western audiences while critiquing policies like mandatory hejab are often painted in Western media with the same broad brush as those who do, as Behdad found: “Reviews of [contemporary Middle Eastern artists’] works in Western media are peppered with . . . stereotypes, underwritten by the assumption that these artists intend to speak for the oppressed women of the region rather than speak to them” (Behdad, 2016: 167).

In her study of English-language life narratives by Middle Eastern women in the early years of the War on Terror, Gillian Whitlock demonstrates how the experiences of individuals represented in popular memoirs like Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi, 2003) were co-opted as “soft weapons” to produce “a careful manipulation of opinion and emotion in the public sphere and a management of information in the engineering of consent” (Whitlock, 2007: 3). Memoirs, she argues, are particularly susceptible due to their ability to “personalize and humanize categories of people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard” (2007: 3). As a result, these books “trigger[ed] conversations and interactions across cultures in conflict” (Whitlock, 2007: 3) as the authors may have intended, but also were co-opted to justify the War on Terror in ways reminiscent of colonialist claims of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988).

Approaching this issue directly, in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) demonstrated that the soft power approach of co-opting Muslim women’s narratives has also included the mobilization of orientalist imagery, where the use of photographs of women – whether on book covers or in PR campaigns – worked in tandem with texts to present cultural justifications for post-9/11 military intervention. Similarly, Dana Cloud’s analysis of the role played by photojournalists’ images of Afghan women after 9/11 led her to argue that these photographs should be seen as part of public diplomacy enacted by American media like Time and the New York Times (Cloud, 2002). Joining these depictions of contemporary Afghan women, snapshots from the 1960s and 1970s have also circulated online, purporting to show a secular past and thus similarity with the West (Shams, 2017; Warren, 2017). These vintage snapshots often are juxtaposed with images of the present (“before-and-after”) to depict a stark difference and encourage the American public to support continued intervention.

Taken together, these analyses identify a key concern in a larger set of critiques of diasporic self-representations that appear to offer a stamp of “insider” authenticity to those who have kept Afghanistan and Iran in their crosshairs for over four decades. While the range of representations and intentions of their creators may have grown with Web 2.0, it is in this broader landscape that images and stories that connect geopolitical moments to individual experience go viral. The media may be new, but the well-trodden messages remain familiar: that Middle Eastern women are oppressed, Islam is responsible, and the West therefore must intervene to “save” them and to prevent migration from abroad and “Islamification” at home.

Authenticity and family photos in the global attention economy

What happens when family snapshots are digitized and made public, entering the global visual economy as representations of a people, politics, time, and place? Numerous studies have shown how the social practices and meanings of snapshots have shifted as the predominant modes of making, storing, and circulating photography have moved from analog to digital. This digital shift entails new uses of vernacular photographs in public spheres, particularly as a means of communication on digital platforms (Keightley and Pickering, 2014). While analog presentations like photo albums are in some ways mimicked and in other ways altered by digital platforms that enable broader dissemination, digital circulation is still centered in many ways on memory and sharing: posting photos or videos to social media contributes to ongoing social and political relations by enabling shared meaning creation (Balbi et al., 2016: 9). These new uses can also reconfigure identity, for example through self-promotion in public or semi-public online settings (Palmer, 2010).

Whether through analog or digital albums, this sharing of images in meaning creation is one of the many ongoing processes of exchange that photographs undergo as objects in circulation. In her study of British family photos made public in news media, Gillian Rose showed that, even prior to the digital shift, the publication of family images moved them “from one set of circuits and sites in the visual economy to another,” from intimate social relations where they are not overtly commodified to an “anonymous and abstracted” public sphere where they can become so (Rose, 2010: 72). Although recontextualized snapshots circulate online more quickly than in the traditional media formats Rose studied, they too undergo commodification, and perhaps even more intensely as they encounter the online attention economy. ⁶ Like the unintended consequences of circulating life narratives described above, photographers or copyright owners may not circulate family images online with a goal of profit, but when photos are deemed “eye-grabbing” they become key currency for content aggregators whose business model is based on the prospect of virality and continued circulation.

Family photos from pre-revolutionary Iran assert authenticity and thus value for digital publishers by affirming the hegemonic discourses of orientalism and by conforming to relatable family photo conventions. The shared imperative to photograph moments of celebration, leisure, and rites of passage (“Kodak moments”) has created a selection of common views that simultaneously limits the representational scope of a family’s album while also creating familiarity for external viewers (Spence and Holland, 1991). As Zuromskis demonstrated, snapshots have become both a “prescriptive cultural ritual” (2013: 9) and, through their indexicality, a seemingly “undeniable assurance that, to quote Roland Barthes’ famous phrase, ‘that has been’” (Zuromskis, 2013: 314). Popular misunderstandings of the 20th century as a time before Photoshop, and thus before photo modification, reassure contemporary audiences that mid-century family snapshots offer a truthful glimpse of “how it really was.” This authenticity is further confirmed by the traces of now-outdated technology retained in digitization (grainy textures, white trim edges, black-and-white or washed-out color), even if these characteristics and the front-facing poses they capture actually point to the many ways photographs are always selective constructions. As Tina Campt (2009: 90) has shown, even when not overtly altered, the images usually selected for family albums and for public remediation tend to be those which depict the family’s history as its members wish to be seen, rather than “how it really was.” Once decontextualized, anonymized, and placed in new narratives in digital circulation, this very selective set of images becomes meaningful in the global visual economy through the authenticating power of family photographs despite these selecting processes.

As with all media, viewing family photographs is always intertextual. This was recognized by Annette Kuhn (2002), who showed that “memories evoked by a photo do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in a network, an intertext, of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments” (2002: 14). By examining the circulations, re-articulations, and commodification of Middle Eastern family photos, I heed Zuromskis’s call to go beyond the contents of these snapshots to examine their social lives, including “the various and shifting social contingencies that give the image meaning” (2013: 11). In its anonymized 21st-century digital circulation as a vintage photograph, caspian-girl for some viewers is a source of nostalgia; for others a snapshot of a pretty girl at the beach. But the persistent power of orientalist discourses in Western mediawork also has provided a key context for the public interpretation and continued circulation of this photo from the Middle East.

One way that political contexts and social contingencies have operated as caspian-girl circulates through the attention economy is through what I have termed clickbait orientalism. Clickbait describes an internet text and/or image designed to attract clicks by generating a “curiosity gap” through keywords or eye-catching photos that trigger emotional responses like surprise, anger, or disbelief in order to generate advertising revenue (Gardiner, 2015). Clickbait photos, in particular, are featured on global viral publishers’ websites (e.g. 9GAG, imgur) where users upload and/or share images, often memes; in advertising on journalism websites (e.g. CNN, Business Insider); and on aggregator websites that collect web content to repackage, republish, and resell it (e.g. All That’s Interesting). When drawing upon images of the Middle East, in this case Iran, this form of co-optation focuses on the re-packaging of content from memoirs, personal essays, family photos, and other forms of authenticated ‘evidence’ to draw attention by highlighting similarities and differences that shock viewers and show the presumed danger of contemporary Iran and Iranians to Western democratic life. Taken together, the resulting blog posts, slideshows, listicles, and social media posts work to promote and, literally, sell orientalist binaries.

In his 1995 study, Naficy analyzed television news, sitcoms, jokes, and even pro-wrestling to show how American mediawork about Iran since 1979 involved “cultural dispersal and economic commodification” that enlarged the “repertoire of stereotypes” of Iranians as Others, thereby making possible “a gradual but significant modification” of manifest forms without a fundamental change to their latent orientalist ideology (Naficy, 1995: 82). Following Naficy, I argue that clickbait orientalism constitutes a 2010s continuation of this mediawork, forming a new iteration of the well-established approach of using women’s bodies, dress, and rights to legitimize imperialism and justify Western military intervention in the Middle East. Below, I trace the circulation of caspian-girl by drawing out three of the many overlapping representational modes in the circulation of remediated Iranian family archives: as nostalgia, as public diplomacy, and as viral journalism, concluding with a further remediation that reminds us that digital ciriculation is ongoing and social meanings are never fixed.

Digital diasporic archives and the sharing of nostalgia

The global trend of posting vintage photos online, usually with a positive or wistful nostalgic lens, has become a social media phenomenon with its own hashtags: #vintage, #nostalgia, #throwback. While Middle Easterners have participated by posting digitized vintage images from their homes in Cairo, Beirut, or Istanbul, this type of engagement in the Iranian new media landscape began in the diaspora (see Ryzova, 2015). Early contributions to the Nostalgia section of diaspora hub Iranian.com (Figure 2) – popular from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s – included scans of family photos among digitized ephemera like magazine covers, advertisements, film posters, and newspaper clippings. These were joined in the 2010s by posts to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Figure 3), both by the diaspora and by Iranians in Iran.

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Figure 2.

Screenshot of a user-submitted family photo in Iranian.com’s Nostalgia section in 2005.

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Figure 3.

Two 2015 Instagram posts by Ajam Media Collective, featuring scanned images with captions submitted to the Ajam Digital Archive.

When brought together as nostalgic collections of pre-revolutionary images, the digital scans of pop stars and modern cityscapes mix with snapshots of urban Iranians with stylish haircuts, bellbottom pants, and, often, British and American cars. The effect is the depiction of a young society living what appear to be carefree, affluent, and modern lives that closely resemble urban Western youth of the same period. ⁷ This is a reflection of the media of the time but, also, in family photos, the intersection of socioeconomic class (e.g. those with access to point-and-shoot cameras) and socio-religious disposition: individuals from conservative families may choose to avoid publicly displaying their snapshots (online or otherwise) in order to honor the privacy of the unveiled family members who appear in them.

Iranians in Iran and immigrants in diaspora may contribute, seek out, and respond to such photos to confirm their family narratives, validate similar experiences, and show the rest of the world the Iran they knew and lived. Second-generation Iranians (the children of immigrants) may share family photos to communicate identity but also to submit a corrective to Western media images of Iran that contrast significantly with their family’s photos (Figures 4 and 5). Non-Iranians seek out these images as well, whether as nostalgic former expats or as curious individuals looking to learn.

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Figure 4.

Screenshot of a photo essay on The Guardian website featuring contributed family photos, shared over 13,000 times as of July 2018.

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Figure 5.

A viral tweet by user @ritapanahi, December 2017.

The broad appetite for these images has led to articles beyond diaspora-focused outlets to intermediaries such as Tehran Bureau, a specialized independent news site affiliated first with PBS in the US (2009–13) and later with The Guardian UK (2013–16). Tehran Bureau featured Iran-focused content including photo essays like, “Iranian fashion: between the veils” (Figure 4). Referring to the period between 1939, when the veil was temporarily banned, and 1983, when the veil was made compulsory (Milani, 1992: 38), the text pitches the essay to Western audiences (including diaspora members), describing its focus on “family albums [that] capture Iranian women’s embrace of western fashion” (Niknejad, 2014). The essay thus seeks to enable diasporic nostalgizing while also responding to mediawork that has pitted Iran and Iranians in opposition to the West.

Iranians’ social media posts also circulate vintage photos, often incorporating personal memories, identifying family members, and sometimes also making claims on truth. For example, in a Twitter thread reacting to protests in Iran in December 2017, user @ritapanahi tweeted a series of family photos intermixed with public pre-revolutionary images. One of her snapshots (Figure 5) is a black-and-white photo presented as public evidence of women in pre-1979 Iran as “professional, independent, and free” – with the authorizing and authenticating English tweet, “This is my mum & her friends in Iran before the Islamic revolution.” Liked by 26,756 users as of July 2018, the tweet responded to political realities in contemporary Iran, but also to Western representations of Iranian women as primordially oppressed, posing a challenge to the flattening effect of most post-1979 depictions.

These online circulations of vintage Iranian snapshots enable memory work for diaspora Iranians by contributing to collective memory and social meaning creation in ways that expand on the impacts of the analog album. In a promotional essay for Iranian.com, the creator of the Iran Before the Chador project (Figure 6) described how such albums had been integral to his identity formation as a diaspora child:

My good old days are the days my family would sit and tell me about theirs, in Iran before the revolution. They would laugh and cry and show me old photos. . .. [W]hen I look at these old photos of my family in Iran, I get a feeling I assume is close to how home feels. . .. (Music, 2011b)

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Figure 6.

Screenshot of beforethechador.com/preview as captured in July 2018.

The creator of the project is an Iranian-American rap artist who goes by the name Malkovich Music (MM); the photos he selected were taken before he was born. Initially, he told me, MM was drawn to digitizing meaningful family photos strictly for preservation purposes. But once he started, he discovered images he liked for aesthetic qualities, and eventually he visited each of his mother’s seven siblings in Los Angeles seeking access to their suitcases full of snapshots and home movies. Inspired, he created a project dedicated to the memory of his grandfather (“a love letter to my family”) that began with a website and that he hopes will culminate in a book.

According to MM, his one-day exhibition featuring 30 photographs was a last-minute idea primarily intended to bring out a crowd for his latest music video shoot. Since only friends and family had attended this short exhibition, in our interview MM made it clear that online press from mainstream outlets like the Atlantic had been far more impactful in the long-term. He was pleased with this exposure and was not bothered that these articles sometimes centered on the trope of “looking behind the veil”; after all, this had been invited by his title, Iran Before the Chador. In our interview, MM was aware but unconcerned that Iranian women wore chadors (a floor-length cloth covering that envelops the back of the head) centuries before the 1979 revolution. He was convinced that viewers knew what he meant by the title, and, smiling, he added: “It rhymes.”

MM’s lack of concern for historical specificity in the circulation of his family’s photographs reflects his priorities. As an independent musician who describes himself as “a homeless traveling rapper on a permanent world tour,” MM’s work to self-promote and create exposure through Before the Chador was motivated in part by a need to build an audience (Music, 2019). When I asked how he curated his exhibition from what he described as several hundred photos at his disposal, he replied, “I didn’t think about it too much. Just good-looking stuff.” MM recognized the potential draw of intimate images of what is often referred to in Western media as a “hidden” Iran; from the outset, these images entered the public sphere in order to garner attention.

After the image of MM’s aunt – caspian-girl – went viral, MM said his family had not understood what that meant, nor why that popularity had not translated to financial returns. Why hadn’t their ownership of the image, noted in a copyright watermark, led to usage fees? Putting the issue of digital ownership and the quick decontextualization of viral images momentarily aside, MM’s website also does not display ads nor does it appear to generate revenue. As part of the growing young precariat, MM’s desire for exposure as an end in itself was one that his family did not recognize as potentially more valuable to him than immediate monetization.

Though MM insisted that his motivations for sharing these images did not include redressing mainstream representations of Iran, his website’s project description of a time before the 1979 revolution nevertheless suggests that his title choice was more than rhythmic, or only exposure-seeking: “[B]efore the government told people how to dress, before home became prison, before fear became part of the Iranian heart and soul” (Music, 2011a). MM’s focus on the chador as symbolic of a time “after,” marked by fear and repression, reveals his view of the revolution (and that of many others in diaspora) but also directly connects to a long history of orientalist tropes presenting Middle Eastern women’s bodies and attire as symbols of oppression. MM’s title choice thus must also be viewed in the context of US media representations since the 1980s that have focused disproportionately on images of veiled Muslim women (Chan-Malik, 2011), and in a 2010s context of continuing US rhetoric clamoring for “Iran next.”

Furthermore, the project’s title explicitly guides viewers to notice the sartorial choices of the women in these photos, especially the lack of veils. It is never made explicit whether or not MM’s Jewish family members ever chose to veil in Iran at the time, though many Muslim women did. ⁸ Nor is it ever mentioned that Iranian women – like all people – make sartorial choices appropriate to their social and cultural contexts, including chadors: the same woman may have chosen to wear a chador to run an errand and a bathing suit to the beach. In fact, the two people also leaning on the car in the caspian-girl image are actually wearing chadors: the individual closest to the camera has pulled her white floral chador to her waist, perhaps to take in the sun, while her companion still wears hers on her head, perhaps to shield herself from the sun.

In offering his family’s album to the public, MM has contributed an important counter-image to the dark chador-heavy media representations of Iran that focus on Islam and erase religious minorities’ experiences. But in generalizing their experiences and centering the chador in hopes of garnering wider attention, he created other gaps of representation that are specific to his family’s intersections of class, religion, and social position. Lacking these contextual details, caspian-girl and the other photographs MM promoted online are made to represent the larger Iranian population when they of course only offer a glimpse at moments of leisure of an urban, apparently affluent, Iranian Jewish family.

Public diplomacy and soft weapons

Press for Before the Chador extended well past the exhibition and included international digital outlets like Spanish-language BBC Mundo, Portuguese-language BBC Brasil, and Persian-language BBC Persian and Radio Farda. Each of these is funded by Western governments as part of their efforts at public diplomacy, constituting important avenues of soft power used to communicate to foreign publics.

After 9/11 and 7/7, both the US and UK recommitted to public diplomacy and soft power by increasing funding for programs targeting the Middle East. The potential of digital media in these efforts has been harnessed by governments through the expansion of satellite television programming, website development, and social media engagement. In the UK, the BBC World Service has broadcast “the word and worldview of the metropolitan center” under the “aura of impartiality” created by the larger BBC brand for over 70 years (Baumann et al., 2011: 135–7). According to Baumann et al. (2011: 136), content produced and circulated by over 30 language services of the BBC World Service therefore conduct not only linguistic translations but cultural translations as well.

In the BBC World Service’s online coverage of Before the Chador on three separate foreign-language arms, caspian-girl was used as the cover image of a slideshow of MM’s family photos. Attention to variations between accompanying text written for Western-language audiences and those for Persian-language audiences reveal how these BBC outlets used family photos as soft weapons through cultural translation.

Whereas the BBC Persian headline for caspian-girl offers a literal translation of “Before the Chador” (Ghabl az chador), the Spanish headline of BBC Mundo, read: “In photos: a trip without veils to pre-revolutionary Iran” (BBC Mundo, 2011). Here the “peek” trope is deployed through reference to time travel, with the clickbaity sub-head: “Unthinkable images of an Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution.” Similarly, the caption for caspian-girl in the BBC Persian gallery reads simply, “Weekend break at the Caspian seaside, 1963,” a close translation of MM’s caption. On BBC Mundo, however, the Spanish caption adds editorialized explanatory text: “Before the Islamic revolution of 1979, before the arrival of the chador (a type of veil used by Muslim women), it was possible to find young women like the one in the photo, with a completely different conception of the body” (Figure 7). Despite MM’s confidence, his title has been taken literally and transferred to this authoritative caption, announcing the arrival of the chador in 1979 and thereby erasing centuries of presence – including in the very image it captions. Further, the caption suggests it would be impossible that this woman or her entire “conception of the body” could be present in Iran today. That the author presumes to know what any woman’s conception of her body is from a single image, let alone that of millions of contemporary Iranian women, rests on normative assumptions of East/West binaries and associated gender norms. In its phrasing, the caption silently refers to orientalist representations of oppressed women whose freedom is entirely bound up with their dress, putting forward as common sense the notion that Iran has reverted to a pre-modern era.

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Figure 7.

Screenshots from 2011 photo galleries on BBC Persian and BBC Mundo featuring caspian-girl, with captions.

Captions like these reveal the ways Before the Chador was used as a source of authorized misinformation in public diplomacy by relying on MM’s snapshots and authenticated voice as an “insider.” These representations create a sense of relatability to an Iranian past by both drawing from and contributing to orientalist and Islamophobic discourses. When these kinds of normative appraisals and erroneous content come from the BBC – with its “aura of impartiality” – it is perhaps not surprising to find that other sources have expressed them in even more audacious ways.

Clickbait orientalism: selling shocking similarity and difference in blogs and viral journalism

The circulation of caspian-girl moved quickly from MM’s website and publicity to listicles, blogs, and photo essays. Highlighted on its own – first as The Atlantic’s Daily Dish “Face of the Day” and later on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter – caspian-girl eventually became used as clickbait on viral publishing sites like 9GAG, imgur, Bored Panda, and ebaumsworld. Used without credit, MM’s content copyright has been ignored and the image cropped to remove his watermark. Worse, some viral publishers added their own watermarks, to MM’s great frustration. These kinds of posts are dominated by advertising and circulated quickly across social media thanks to captions and headlines with sensationalized, curiosity-gap-forming text like, “You May Not Believe it, But it’s Iran in 1960s.”

These uses of caspian-girl fall in line with a trend of re-circulating Iranian family photographs alongside photojournalism to demonstrate similarity between everyday lives in pre-revolutionary Iran and the present West. Articles and photo essays employ clichéd metaphors of seeing behind, beyond, or under the veil to draw audiences to click on slideshows offering peeks into Iran. For example, in a 2017 Daily MailOnline “round-up” of vintage photos from the internet, clickbait language and orientalist veil metaphors promised “surprising,” “stunning,” images of “an unseen side of a country” that has been “long . . . shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.” Boasting over 5300 shares, the extended title of the photo essay explicitly highlights dances and fashions relatable to Western viewers: “From locals doing the ‘Tehran twist’ to students sporting mullets and miniskirts: Fascinating photos reveal life in Iran before the revolution” (Leach, 2017). English-language comments on these types of articles often dismally marvel that the chadored masses of the nightly news once looked so much “like us.”

A 2014 photo essay from All That’s Interesting, a media website that curates “viral-oriented content” for ad revenue (Figure 8), ⁹ offers another example of the way text and image are deployed to shock viewers with similarities:

These fascinating photos of Iran before 1979 reveal just how similar the country was to the Western nations that are now its enemies.. . . [T]here once was a time when the streets of Tehran mirrored those of, say, L.A., and national leaders would engage in discourse that consisted of more than sighs, sanctions and spats. (Cox, 2014)

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Figure 8.

Screenshot of All That’s Interesting photo essay featuring a highly circulated photograph of Iranian women, usually dated 1971, source uncredited. Two advertisements have been cropped from this screenshot.

This opening paragraph sets a familiar oppositional binary of Iran today and a timeless set of “Western nations,” especially the United States, reflecting a contemporary amnesia about decades of close US–Iran relations, let alone how those relations emerged. A Tehran that “mirrored . . . L.A.” is presented as a time-space when popular fashions were from the West and Iranian leaders were pliable to American will. In this framing, modernity is only recognizable through wholesale consumption of Western norms, desires, products, and discourses – evident in the “fascinating photos” that follow.

Bloggers and social media users sharing caspian-girl also added politicized and sensationalized captions that interpreted MM’s aunt as a secular, liberated woman in an illiberal place. Like in the BBC Mundo caption above, some textually tempted the viewer to imagine the fate of such a woman in Iran today, while others, like this South African blogger, stated it outright: “Iran, 1960. [sic] She might be sentenced to death if wearing this in public today” (McCleland, 2014). These set-ups anonymize MM’s aunt in an imagined space wherein her own agency, desires, actions, and thoughts (“conception of her body”) are presumed to be wholly Western, simply by virtue of her beach attire.

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2007) have theorized the process by which iconic images become symbols in the West, beginning with a transition to anonymity that, “always shifts the emphasis from individual experience to social types, characteristic responses, and collective obligations” (2007: 90). Blog and social media posts that featured caspian-girl among the many photos of pre-revolutionary Iran without credit anonymized the pictured girl while adding “characteristic responses”: orientalist binaries transmitted through Western mediawork as taken-for-granted evidence of the inferiority of post-revolutionary Iran. For example, an American blogger deployed this “common sense” in 2015: “As you can see, the now conflict-torn and chaotic nation of Iran was once just as luxurious and normal as even our country. . .. At one time, the leaders of these countries [Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq] could rationalize better than they can now; they weren’t insane” (Cline, 2015). These kinds of textual emphases of the visual symbolism that the anonymous image is made to represent push viewers towards specific political aims and, as Hariman and Lucaites predicted, collective action.

This collective action was not only directed at influencing foreign policy towards Iran; in other instances, caspian-girl was used to express domestic concerns within Western societies. In re-tweets by social aggregator accounts and individual users sharing caspian-girl, accompanying text drew out comparisons between today’s “insane” and “chaotic” Iran and its imaged “normal” past – but ultimately to serve as a cautionary tale for the West. For example, popular American comedian Sarah Silverman’s 2015 tweet of the photo garnered nearly 3000 likes as it warned about women’s rights in the United States: “Before u scoff at women saying their rights are not-so-slowly being taken away, take a look at 1960’s Iran” (Figure 9). In a similar but more explicitly Islamophobic example, a 2014 Swedish tweet called upon users’ received stereotypes of present-day Iran to imagine a future Sweden: “Iranian woman before the Islamic Revolution in 1960, what does Iran look like today? Should we have this development in Sweden? #svpol” (Figure 9). Texts and captions like these prompt imagined outcomes in the West if intervention does not deter encroaching Iranian geopolitical power, silently recalling decades of media-stoked fears of “creeping Shariah.”

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Figure 9.

Two Twitter shares of caspian-girl as domestic political commentary.

As these tweets illustrate, caspian-girl had become anonymized but symbolic, and thus what Hariman and Lucaites (2007: 88) would call an individuated aggregate, representing “neither everywoman and everyman nor specific persons with names and stories.” The result of this simultaneously personal and social abstraction, they argue, is an emotional response. Since clickbait seeks attention through creating such an emotional response, caspian-girl became a particularly effective source of content, especially when combined with sensationalized text and images drawing before-and-after comparisons. A post to “alternative news” website beforeitsnews.com titled, “Iranian Time Warp! A Side of Iran You Have Never Seen, or Even Imagined! Shocking Photos You Won’t Forget!” is exemplary (Figure 10). Again, the accompanying text promises to shock by revealing an Iran beyond viewers’ imaginations – only accessible through metaphors of science fiction – that “reveal[s] what will happen to the USA if we don’t take control!” The post continues:

What you are about to see will shock you. And it won’t just shock you, it will literally stun you. I have seen these pictures before, and still, my jaw drops whenever I look at them. It saddens me to see a people so free and so happy, and in only such a short amount of time, in bondage, angry and miserable. (Leahz, 2014)

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Figure 10.

Screenshot of a 2014 post on beforeitsnews.com.

These binaries of freedom/bondage and happiness/misery are reportedly evidenced by a series of uncaptioned and uncredited family photos, magazine covers, and professional photos of young people in 1960s–1970s Iran – including caspian-girl. This exact series of photos, collected from listicles and social media posts, was repeated on at least six other viral publishing websites. This one, however, also includes a set of uncaptioned “after” photographs, depicting veiled Iranian women: sitting on steps reading books, triumphantly protesting during the 2009 Green Movement, mourning blanketed earthquake victims, and smiling for a group photo. The accompanying text is a passionate call to action for American Christians to prevent the spread of misery and bondage that the author sees as obvious in these juxtaposed images.

These examples demonstrate that the digital co-optations of family snapshots trade on orientalist tropes and the indexical power of family photographs. When further remediated by content aggregators, bloggers, social media users, and contributors looking to monetize the “curiosity gap” created by manipulating Western audiences’ emotions, these digitized snapshots of family moments become anonymous, symbolic, weaponized, and monetized in the global visual economy.

Ongoing circulations

As Kuhn keenly observed, “there can be no last word . . . about any photograph” (2002: 19). A decade after it was originally uploaded, caspian-girl continues to circulate online, generating new meanings and remediations. In 2019, the Iranian nostalgia Instagram account @CafeNostal posted a colorized version of the photo without attribution or credit (Figure 11). Garnering 20,799 likes, the long, poetic caption in Persian mixes sea and automobile metaphors to build sensory nostalgia as it describes the image through the historical confluences that it conjures for an Iranian generation about to realize the “failures and false faces of what lies ahead.” Of hundreds of shares of caspian-girl, this Persian caption is the only instance I found that mentioned the two chadored women when describing the scene. It does so not because they are shocking, but because they are mundane: that chadors coexist with bathing suits is, for Iranian audiences, unremarkable.

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Figure 11.

Instagram post by Iranian nostalgia account @cafenostal of a digitally colorized version of caspian-girl, January 2019.

Indeed, these global circulations of MM’s photo have never only been about diaspora, nor only viewed in the West; they have always included audiences in Iran. This was also affirmed when caspian-girl re-emerged in yet another form through the work of artist Soheila Sokhanvari (Figure 12). A visual artist who was born in Iran but experienced the 1979 revolution from her British boarding school, Sokhanvari’s award-winning work uses family photographs as sources to investigate “the concept of collective trauma as an experience that can be told through the narratives of individuals” (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 2015). As part of her artistic practice, Sokhanvari selects photos from pre-1979 Iran – largely from her own family archive – and draws them repeatedly, manipulating details by using colors, patterns, and non-traditional materials (e.g. crude oil, gold, her hair) to literally weave together the individual, familial, national, and geopolitical.

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Figure 12.

Three 2015 remediations of caspian-girl by Soheila Sokhanvari, each titled “Shahrzad.”

To collect additional images for her artistic practice, she told me, Sokhanvari asked relatives in Iran for photographs from their family archives. Her cousin sent the digitized caspian-girl file not because of its place in a family album, but because like so many others around the world, she too had come across it online. But the pictured girl was not just an anonymous figure to her cousin; she recognized her as a school friend, one with whom she had lost touch in the tumultuous years that followed their girlhood. In its life as a digital image, caspian-girl had circulated as nostalgia, public diplomacy, clickbait, but also – and again – as an aide-memoire, this time of a lost friend.

Sokhanvari’s remediation of caspian-girl moved it to the offline spaces of the exhibition wall, demonstrating the continued interplay of analog and digital forms in the social life of this image. But even in her quite personal artistic practice, she chose to re-anonymize the pictured girl, titling her work “Shahrzad” after the female storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights. In this newly remediated form, MM’s aunt has become the sole person in the image but remains an individuated aggregate, at once personal and impersonal, individual and collective. According to Sokhanvari: “I think the women in Iran are all Shahrzads – we’ve all got stories to tell.” As caspian-girl illustrates, however, once shared, the future meanings of those stories and the photos they accompany, like the future uses of archives, are never foretold.