History often survives through photographs. But what happens when the camera was absent at the moment history was made?
In From Iran: A Visual Testimony, on view at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology through March 21, 2027, Iranian artist Azadeh Akhlaghi reconstructs pivotal moments in twentieth-century Iranian history that were never photographed. Using actors, carefully researched historical settings, and cinematic staging, Akhlaghi invites viewers to reconsider how we use images to reconstruct—and sometimes entirely conceptualize—history.
As war and political transition engulf Iran once again, the exhibition also serves as a reminder that history often repeats itself and that contemporary events have also emerged from a much longer history of revolution, intervention, and resistance.
Produced over 14 years, Akhlaghi’s project depicts 11 historical episodes, beginning in 1908, when the country’s parliament was bombarded during the Constitutional Revolution. The final photos recreate the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the monarchy and established the rule of Ayatollah clerics.
The exhibition was funded by Harvard’s Gardner Fellowship in Photography, established by Robert G. Gardner ’48, A.M. ’58, to support projects examining “the human condition anywhere in the world.”
Born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1978, Akhlaghi grew up in Mashhad, a large pilgrimage city near the country’s mountainous northeastern border. She studied computer science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia before returning to Iran during the early 2000s to work in film. She turned to photography in 2006, and her work has been exhibited internationally.
At first glance, the photographs in From Iran appear to be authentic historical documents, rather than meticulously researched and choreographed performances. The illusion is intentional: staging large-scale panoramas in real Iranian locations, Akhlaghi writes in the exhibit text that she sought to “re-visualize the moments that were never photographed.” Rather than presenting actual photographs from Iranian history—which in many cases don’t exist for the moments Akhlaghi seeks to depict—the artist recreates critical scenes that shaped the country’s political and social trajectory through a combination of historical records, eyewitness testimony, and artistic interpretation.
At the exhibition entrance, an inscription on the gallery wall warns visitors about “depictions of violence, oppression, and death.” The warning proves necessary. Though cinematic recreations, many of the photographs portray bloodshed and violence. In The Bombardment of the Parliament, for example, figures scatter chaotically across the grounds surrounding the parliamentary building as smoke rises in the distance. The image conveys the confusion of the attack during one of the most turbulent moments in modern Iranian history.
In The Great Iranian Migration—perhaps the most visually arresting photograph in the exhibition—a stream of refugees treks across the terrain of a vast, snow-covered mountain landscape. The composition depicts Iranians escaping the Russian forces advancing on Tehran during World War I.
In many of the images, the artist herself appears in the frame, wearing a red shawl. These cameos transform Akhlaghi from a detached observer into a “participant-witness,”simultaneously creating and observing the pictured events.
For example, Akhlaghi can be seen in The First Iranian Women’s Movement, which presents a reconstruction of the interior of Dr. Kahhal’s office in Tehran. She is meant to represent the aunt of Mirza Jahangir Khan, Sur-E Esrafil, who was an Iranian writer, intellectual, and revolutionary executed during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). Akhlaghi is seated next to an actress who represents the mother of Mirza Asadollah Khan. The two represent martyrs of the Parliament bombardment. Dozens of women gather throughout the richly detailed room, seated on carpets or standing in conversation as sunlight streams through the windows. The scene captures an imagined moment in the real historical record, as women prepare to march on parliament in 1911 in protest of domestic politics as well as foreign influence over Iran.
In total, Akhlaghi recreates 11 distinct historical episodes across 16 photographs. On the back wall of the gallery, a video plays the whole sequence of photos in a loop.
In a sense, the photographs feel even more striking as actor-led recreations than if they were real photographs. In the transient, fast-moving action of a war, revolution, or protest, photography can capture only a momentary glimpse and offers only a fleeting snapshot of the constantly shifting human emotions behind those events.
Staged photographs, however, allow the photographer to string together many different episodes into a narrative whole, almost like a filmmaker composing a cinematic scene. Yet, as static images, Akhlaghi’s photos allow viewers to absorb the action at their own pace and to draw their own conclusions.
