Over the past year, Tori Egherman, Kamran Ashtary, and Hamid Tehrani have been working on the book Hope, Votes & Bullets, which is currently available.
Here is the text of the introduction:
A few days before the election, a friend called from the middle of hundreds of thousands gathered in Azadi [Freedom] Square in support of reform and wearing green. “Can you believe what we have done?” We heard the hope and excitement in his voice. “I am in the middle of half a million people,” he told us. “We are changing Iran.” A few years earlier he had told us that he would never ever get involved with politics again. He had been a student activist in the late 90s and felt betrayed by the regime and his fellow citizens when the movement was violently dispersed and many of its participants imprisoned, some for years. Now our friend was full of hope. How could we help but feel otherwise?
This book was born from that hope. It started with email chats and phone calls and ballooned into a major undertaking that will likely be an ongoing project for years to come. The three of us working on collecting the material shared a love for Iran, a passion for blogs and blogging, and a strong sense of the imperfect power of democracy. We shared a connection, both virtual and physical. We had all been up nights blogging about the campaign in Iran, talking to strangers, friends, family: anyone who would share information about what was happening on the streets.
Since the election, we have collected blog posts, images, and articles that reflect the immediacy of the year in Iran from the flawed elections to the silent marches, to crackdowns, executions, torture, and rape; from Where is my vote to I demand my rights, from reform to activism, wrongs to rights, revolution to evolution and back again.
This is a personal collection, filled with raw emotion, interspersed with more measured reflection. Journalists, writers, filmmakers, academics, activists, bloggers, artists, cartoonists, and bloggers have all contributed. The book honors the diversity of their voices and opinions.
This book does not tell the whole story and does not try to. There are many voices, too many for any book to ever give a complete view of what happened over the past year in Iran.
Several of the authors have chosen to remain anonymous, others are named. Some have written specifically for this collection, others have agreed to allow us to reprint their work.
This is a shared effort with many voices and images; it is a labor of love, framed in a design that gives life and power to the words and the events behind them.
Read more at the book’s website.
