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.

The Demon Reveals Himself

Last Friday, June 12th, was an historic presidential election in Iran. Many of our loved ones were campaigning for reform in Iran. When the overwhelming landslide for Ahmadinejad was announced, it sparked an initial despair so overwhelming that people felt there was no hope at all for reform. I went to sleep with the dashed hopes of millions and dreamed of a demon right out of the Shanameh. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this demon:

This painting represents an episode described in Firdawsi’s “Shahnamah” (The Book of Kings), the epic story of ancient kings and heroes of Persia composed by the renowned author during the first decades of the 11th century. The text on the fragments recto and verso describes the painting. King Khusraw summons Rustam to help him stop a demon (div) disguised as a wild ass that is ravaging of the royal herds. After three days of unsuccessful battle, the hero falls asleep in the grass. Thereupon, the Div Akvan casts aside his disguise, resumes his demonic form, rushes towards Rustam, and digs up the ground around the hero. He gives Rustam the choice of being thrown against the mountains, to be eaten by lions and onagers, or cast into the sea, where he would drown to his death. Knowing that the enemy would do the exact opposite and realizing that, if cast to the sea, he would have a chance to swim to survival, he asked to be thrown against the mountains. Rustam is cast to the sea, swims back to the shore, and returns to defeat the demon in combat.

In this image, the demon is running wild through a camp of Iran’s revolutionary guard. The photo was taken by Kamran Ashtary.

Brick Tintin

Since I created the brick Superman, brick figures have been haunting me. I’ve dreamed of brick rodeo girls, brick pinups, a brick Wonder Woman, just to name a few. My dreams are of bricks or css code. Go figure.

This installment features Tintin. Tintin helped me learn to read Persian, Dutch, and French. Thank you Tintin or Kuifje or whatever you call him. In this image, a brick Tintin is running across a desert plain in the Iranian province of Lorestan. Kamran took the photo during Sepa-Basigi (Iran’s revolutionary guards and paramilitary volunteers) maneuvers.

The Brick Superman

Superman often features in my dreams. In one dream he was transformed into a monumental stone sculpture in a post-human landscape. This is a take on that dream, if not an exact transcription.

I don’t have an i-Pod (I know I must be one of the last people on Earth… but I have never felt really safe totally shutting out the world around me), but I still play most of my music on my computer. I love finding new ways to combine my music such as alphabetically or by play count. My new favorite is to choose a random word. In the case of this list, I chose “there” and look at this amazing set:

I’ll Take You There, Staple Singers, City In The Sky
Harry Connick Jr. – With Imagination (I’ll Get There), Harry Connick, Jr., Blue Light Red Light
Who’s There?, Guru, Streetsoul
Reach Out I´ll Be There, The Four Tops, Soul ! – The Very Best Of Motown CD3
There She Goes Again, The Velvet Underground & Nico
Monday, Wilco, Being There
There Is A God, Staple Singers, City In The Sky
Harry Connick Jr. – Blue Light Red Light (Someone’s There), Harry Connick, Jr., Blue Light Red Light
There’s More to Life Than This, Björk, Debut
Smithereens, Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction
Without Love (There’s Nothing), Tom Jones, TOM JONES
If There Is A Hell Bellow, We’re All Going To Go, Lou Donaldson, Say It Loud !
There Will Never Ever Be Another You, Chet Baker, The Best Of Chet Baker Sings
I Saw Her Standing There, Beatles, Please Please Me
Kodachrome, Paul Simon, There goes Rhymin´ Simon
There Will Never Be Another You, Count Basie And Joe Williams, The Greatest!! Count Basie Plays, Joe Williams Sings Standards
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart), Eurythmics, Greatest Hits [Europe]

Tori is moderating a series of lectures for the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. The blog for the lectures is at this link, if you care to join our conversation. You can read about the lecture topics here. You might ask yourself why this information is not available on the Rietveld’s own site? Well, this is the topic of my first rant. I have discovered that Dutch art and design sites are about as hard to link to as specific scenes in movies or tv shows. They are more concerned with accurate pixel placement than conversation. It’s been frustrating for me to link to projects and information because they are hidden in flash sites that have, you guessed it, exactly one url.

So much of the Dutch art and culture internet presence is a long and controlled lecture that is at times lovely and fascinating but keeps its distance from us and what we might want to say about it. Isn’t it time for a change? I ask you…

Purchase Iran: View From Here, a book of photographs

From A Love Letter from Iran, a review by author Kamin Mohammadi:

In describing Iran one is in danger of wearing out that age-old cliché — this is a land of contrasts — and Tori and Kamran’s book does not attempt to explain away the complexity or many contradictions or try to make sense of them. But within the atmospheric range of images and bittersweet essays printed here, they beautifully capture and communicate the immense charm of Iran, its ability to enslave the heart, and the tenacity of its hold over the affections in spite of the frustrations of living there. Most of all, this book is a visual love letter to a country that can befuddle the mind and nourish the soul all at the same time.

Read the rest online at Payvand.

Available in select bookstores. Click here for availability in Amsterdam.

Click here for a flash preview of the book.

Pay with a credit card or a Paypal account:

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The price of $23.00 does not include shipping. Shipping takes 1-3 weeks.

Click here for information on how to pay by check or with a money transfer.

Iran: A View from Here features photographs taken over three years of living in Iran. It is a personal account that features images of Iran that not only include the snow-covered mountains and desert expanses that surround the county but also images that define the culture of Iran: images of mourning and celebration, of day-to-day life, and of special events. We’ve captured an Iran that eludes the casual visitor and often escapes the notice of professional photographers. To order a copy of the book, click on one of the “buy now” buttons above.

The cost of the book is $23.00 plus shipping and taxes. Shipping is $2.50 per book in the US and about €6.80 per book outside the US.

“The most elaborate method to try to understand Iran is captured in the pages of this book. To live in Iran like Tori and Kamran have done, means riding a constant rollercoaster of impressions. Every time you think you have it all figured out, Iranians surprise you.”

–Thomas Erdbrink

Thomas Erdbrink is the Iran-based Middle East correspondent for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC. He has worked and lived in Iran since 2001.

Kamran and I saw the documentary film Landscapes Unknown II, which was astounding in its portrayal of the artist’s vision. The filmmakers Melle van Essen and Riekje Ziengs were able to bridge the distance between the the viewer and the artist and, in a sense, give us new eyes to see with.

At one point, the artist Frans Walon who is completely obsessed with capturing the things that he sees says that we all secretly hope that after death we will continue to see. When I heard that, I realized that, of course, he is correct.

If you are in Amsterdam, you can see the film at the International Film Festival (IDFA) at these times:

Tuschinski 2, Thu 29 Nov. 12:30
Tuschinski 4, Fri 30 Nov. 19:00
Compagnie – Grote Zaal, Sun 02 Dec. 16:30

And an apology to all those folks who got emails from me… And a plea for better INFORMATION DESIGN.

Okay, I am a complete idiot. I hope some of the designers of Stumble Upon read this so that I can tell them how angry I am. I read something like: “add your contacts and see who else is on stumble upon.” SU showed me a page of people I knew. I clicked on “add” or something like that and it added every single contact in my address book.

Years and years of effort to avoid sending spam, automated emails, and other annoying crap down the drain. I’ve avoided opening viruses, avoided sending on chain letters, avoided joining endless annoying viral networks only to have all my credibility ruined by a misleading interface. Am I alone?

Where can I complain about the horrific information design?

Where: Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. In the basement of the new building, room K-18
When: October 31, 2007, at 4 pm

Description

In the Netherlands, the evidence of thoughtful design is everywhere: the bike paths, the traffic crossings, the newspapers, the garbage collection, and the café menu, to name but a few. Here, design has become a habit, a way of life. The belief in its power is fundamentally unquestioned.

Yet even here, there are pockets of doubt. Imagine how much more difficult it is to come to a shared agreement when the value of design has never been firmly established and in a culture where the fundamentals of communication differ dramatically.

The speaker found herself in that situation when she did design work in Iran. For four years, she lived and worked in Tehran: a city that has forgotten design after just thirty years of explosive growth. There are no orderly traffic crossings, no thoughtfully organized neighborhoods, and few carefully designed restaurant menus. (There are, however, great posters.)

In this talk, Tori Egherman will discuss some of the communication issues that arose when she and her husband did work with Iranian companies and civil servants.

About the speaker: Tori Egherman is a partner with her husband in Ashtary Design. She is an American who has lived and worked in the U.S., The Netherlands, and Iran. You can read about her experiences in Iran at viewfromiran.blogspot.com.