CHRIS ROPER: Photos from an empire of light and dark

For years now, people on social media have shared a particular set of photos of Iranian women taken in the years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The photographs are in that Kodachrome high-saturation colour, and often accompanied by the slight fading and contrast shifts that give 1970s photos their distinctive retro look.

They show Iranian women participating in ordinary social and public life. They’re studying at universities, working, shopping, visiting hair salons and socialising with men in informal situations. They’re walking in public wearing short skirts and dancing at parties, and the girls go to co-ed schools.

These photos are often contrasted with post-revolution images of women’s lives under Islamic rules. Women dressed in public in the legally required headscarves and loose-fitting clothes, complying with the hijab laws that are enforced by the morality police patrols. Women in public spaces that are now segregated by gender. And of course, no more nostalgically washed-out photos of women applying makeup and laughing.

And that’s pretty much the visual binary that the superficiality of social media has embraced in the West. Freedom before the Islamic Revolution, oppression subsequently. But another photographic trope has entered the timeline.

It’s an aerial shot showing long rows of freshly dug graves in Minab, a city in the province of Hormozgan, on the coast of the Sea of Oman. The 2016 census says that about 75,000 people live in Minab, so a bustling metropolis it’s not.

Travellers’ blogs describe a weekly bazaar on Thursdays, when people from nearby villages converge on the city to sell produce, palm-leaf crafts, pottery and textiles. The market is described as like entering a living museum of southern Iranian culture, with stalls made of palm leaves and sellers wearing colourful traditional clothing.

A notable detail repeated in travel accounts is that, unlike in many Iranian markets, women play a prominent role as vendors, running stalls and selling handicrafts while wearing distinctive colourful masks. The role women play in the history and culture of Minab is longstanding. According to locals, the city was constructed in the distant past by two sisters, Bibi Mino and Bibi Naznin. Another detail is added: the Minab Castle is the only structure that still exists from old Minab, a once-thriving city that was obliterated by the Mongol invasion.

It’s a stark picture, all grey cement and dark graves, with the only pops of colour the yellow excavators being used to dig the graves

And now, the Mongols are back. The freshly dug graves in the aerial shot are for the 168 people, most of them schoolgirls, killed in a February 28 US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school. It’s a stark picture, all grey cement and dark graves, with the only pops of colour the yellow excavators being used to dig the graves.

The awful monotones will remind you of pictures of obliterated Gaza, prefiguring what the US and Israel might eventually achieve in Tehran. Most reputable news outlets aren’t showing photos of the dead children, using the pictures of the grave site to stand in for the horror that happens outside the frame.

The Guardian is not publishing photographs and verified videos from the site “due to their graphic nature”. They show “children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris”, it says. “In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colourful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.

“One distraught man stands in the ruins of the school, waving textbooks and worksheets as rescuers dig by hand through the debris. ‘These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here,’ he shouts. ‘You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study.’”

The girls were aged between seven and 12.

The US missile, part of the initial wave of attacks on the first day of the war, hit during the school’s morning session. I pause here to record the response of one of South Africa’s alt-white musical grifters, Steve Hofmeyr, to news of the death of these children. Responding to the picture of the freshly dug graves, Hofmeyr wrote: “Who sends their children to school when it’s raining missiles?”

You will recall Elon Musk’s comment on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2025, when he said: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilisation, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.”

I would suggest that a rote lack of empathy is also an indicator of being programmed like a robot.

How does this programming work? One way is using images to force a narrative. One doesn’t want to introduce too much nuance into the photos of life under the repressive Iranian regime, which exacted — and continues to exact — a terrible toll on its citizens. Thousands of unarmed demonstrators have been killed, including during the protests that were part of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that followed Mahsa Amini’s death in the custody of the morality police in 2022. The regime is responsible for arbitrary detentions, torture and murders, and violent suppression of freedom of expression. Iran executes almost 1,000 people annually for crimes such as “enmity against God” or “corruption on earth”. We could go on.

Still, the Manichaean nature of the visual narratives means that those who support the US-Israel bombing of Iran can conveniently rationalise the killing of schoolchildren as necessary collateral damage, to use that lovely US phrase that originates from the Vietnam War. That neutral euphemism for killing civilians makes it sound as if the deaths of 168 children are a regrettable but inevitable error, rather than a bloody atrocity.

Looking at the etymology of words and phrases can reveal intriguing facets to a narrative, connections that aren’t immediately apparent. “Manichaean”, which describes a worldview that strictly divides things into absolute good or absolute evil, with no middle ground, comes from the ancient dualistic religion founded in the third century CE by the prophet Mani in what is now Iran. Manichaeism teaches that the world is a struggle between these opposing forces of good (light) and evil (darkness), which is pretty much how the new crusaders praying around Donald Trump choose to think of their bloody assaults on civilised norms and international law.

What sets the photograph of the children’s graves apart from those of 1970s Iran and Iran under the ayatollahs is that it exists in our new media ecosystem, which is polluted by disinformation. So there have been many attempts to claim that the photo was actually of graveyards in Indonesia or Brazil taken during the pandemic. This includes X’s Grok, the AI assistant made in the unlovely image of its owner, Musk.

And this is what we can take from the way these three categories of photographs of Iran work. They’re weapons in the war on nuance, a war in which truth becomes the collateral damage. They’re used to bludgeon us into thinking that there are simple explanations for the US-Israel attack on Iran, and a simplistic way of taking sides. There is not, as 168 dead children testify.

I can only echo my fellow columnist Justice Malala, who wrote in last week’s FM: “Even if the missiles that are zinging across the skies of the Middle East today are silenced, the wounds will fester. The grievances will be fanned and carried in the hearts of people walking the streets of the world’s capitals, on boats and other transport ferrying refugees across seas and borders, in the minds of children who will be taught hatred from the images of relentless bombings and the killings of innocent schoolgirls.”