In the summer of 1906, thousands of men gathered in the gardens of the British Legation in Tehran, protesting the political and economic situation in Iran. This carefully planned protest, which lasted several months, became one of the decisive events of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-11). The camera played a crucial role in recording this key event and in introducing the constitutionalist movement to national and international audiences. I argue that the photographs taken intentionally aligned with and visualized key constitutionalist terms such as niẓām (new order) and intiẓām (good order). In this, the photographs and the protest were markedly different from how we usually envision revolutionary imagery. Unusual for political photographs, the images were mainly circulated not as photographic prints, but as portable picture postcards.

Even though the concept of the “postcard” is today often distinctly connected to the souvenir and perhaps a sense of nostalgia, in turn of the century-Iran the postcard had additional meanings and functioned as an early version of social media, conveying and memorializing images of political events and important personalities.