This volume explores the lives of women in Iran through the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of veiling, unveiling, and re-veiling. Through poetic writings and photographs, Azadeh Fatehrad responds to the legacy of the Iranian Revolution via the representation of women in photography, literature, and film. The images and texts are documentary, analytical, and personal.

The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Adolf Loos, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran, Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present, resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Azadeh Fatehrad is an artist and curator based at the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University London, working primarily with still and moving images in the context of historical representation. She was the St. John’s College artist in residence 2018 at the University of Oxford.

— Reina Lewis, London College of Fashion, author of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures

— Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London, author of Psycho-Nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian Imaginations

— Claudia Yaghoobi, Iranian Studies

— Middle East Journal