“I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.” —Michelangelo Antonioni

As a forerunner of the Iranian documentary cinema, and much like his mentor, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kamran Shirdel has always been presenting his own interpretation of reality, challenging his audience to face a difficult question concerning the nature of an event. However, his commissioned and self-produced documentarie works, even those that were made as industrial documentaries, have been caught in a web of political considerations, which has in turn made them into significant documents of the Iranian contemporary society.

As the first Iranian filmmaker who has made use of photographs as inserts in his works, Shirdel has shot the photographs of this project—which was not commissioned by a specific broadcasting company or news agency—only as inserts for a documentary film. All of these photos were shot in his wanderings in Tehran during the days that led to the Iranian Revolution.

Now we see Kamran Shirdel’s photographs independent of his films, not as historic sociopolitical documents, but as a micro-narrative on the margins of the larger context of the Revolution, next to the dailies that were never made into films.