957348

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ICS0010.1177/1367877920957348International Journal of Cultural StudiesMalek

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2021, Vol. 24(2) 266­–289
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877920957348
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920957348
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Original Article
Clickbait orientalism and
vintage Iranian snapshots

Amy Malek
College of Charleston, USA

Abstract
What happens when vintage family photos are digitized and enter the global visual economy as
representations of a people, politics, time, and place? In this article, I examine the social life of an
exemplary viral snapshot from pre-revolutionary Iran to demonstrate three of the many shifting
uses and social meanings of these snapshots in online global circulations: as representations
for diasporic nostalgizing, as tools of soft power in public diplomacy, and as sources for viral
journalism that contribute to what I call clickbait orientalism. A 21st-century form of digital soft
weaponry, this latter use of Iranian vintage photos trades on gendered orientalist tropes, the
indexical power of family photographs, and the context of four decades of geopolitical tension
to attract attention and thus revenue. Ultimately, these further remediations render such family
snapshots as anonymous, symbolic, weaponized, and monetized, confirming that latent orientalist
ideologies continue to circulate even as their manifest forms change over time.

Keywords
family photos, Iran, mediawork, orientalism, remediation, vintage

Captioned as “seaside weekend (Caspian Sea, 1963),” the striking black-and-white digi-
tized photograph with the file name “caspian-girl” features a teenaged girl in a loose
one-piece bathing suit as she poses against the hood of a 1962 Triumph Herald parked at
the beach (Figure 1). Her suit straps have been placed askew at her shoulders – perhaps
for sensual effect, perhaps to prevent tan lines. Her curvaceous figure is emphasized by
the placement of her right foot atop her left – perhaps striking a coy pose, perhaps avoid-
ing the hot sand. Her braceleted right wrist bears her weight as she leans on the car’s
protruding headlight and her pose partially obscures the Persian numbers of the license
plate, the only visual clue as to the Middle Eastern location of this particular beach. The

Corresponding author:
Amy Malek, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424, USA.
Email: malekap@cofc.edu
Malek 267

Figure 1. “seaside weekend (Caspian Sea, 1963),” file name: caspian-girl.

Reprinted with permission from beforethechador.com.

girl’s dark chin-length hair is wind-blown by the sea air and partially obscures her confi-
dent, unsmiling gaze towards the camera. Two other individuals lean against the side of
the Triumph, their backs to the camera, paying no attention to the photo being taken
behind them. In the far distance, a couple sit together on the sand looking out at the sea.
This captivating snapshot of a day at the beach became an aide-memoire for a girl and
her family; nearly five decades later, it would become a view of mid-20th-century Iran
for a 21st-century global audience.
Caspian-girl is part of Iran Before the Chador, a project that began as a one-day
photo exhibition in Los Angeles in 2011 featuring 30 snapshots from an Iranian Jewish
family’s private albums. The images on display showed parents, children, aunts, and
uncles in various moments of leisure in 1960s and 1970s Iran. Nine of these digitized
family photographs were posted online for promotion for the project, but only one
went viral: by 2018, a reverse Google Image search of caspian-girl produced over
25,270,000,000 results. Just the first 100 of these included social media posts, personal
and professional blogs, aggregator and viral publications, journalists’ articles, slide-
shows, and photo essays in over a dozen languages, demonstrating its global reach.
268 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

How and why did this family snapshot move so rapidly from the family album to the
global visual economy?
Future uses of archives, Stuart Hall (2001: 92) cautioned, “can never be foretold”:
even in official archives, the control over the use of their contents is only temporary,
if ever real. This maxim is all the more true for the digital diasporic archive, an anti-
collection1 of the digitized snapshots, home videos, audio, and ephemera that circu-
late online while the originals remain dispersed, as does the diaspora itself, in private
homes and collections. Family archival material selected by individuals for nostal-
gic, sentimental, or personal purposes becomes more openly accessible to a wider
audience through this vernacular remediation.2 Within the Iranian context, it is fam-
ily photos of pre-revolutionary Iran (1950s to 1979) that have most frequently been
digitized and circulated, contributing to the development of a broader diasporic col-
lective memory and to second-generation post-memory (Malek, 2019). As José Van
Dijk (2008: 59) has shown, however, once this private material is made available for
public consumption, it is also opened to repurposing, decontextualization, and rein-
terpretation. In other words, the greater accessibility enabled by mainstream digital
platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram also opens digitized family archives
to the possibility of losing their contextual frames and owners’ interpretations ever
more quickly.
In her study of snapshot photography, Catherine Zuromskis (2013: 11) drew on Arjun
Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (1988) to examine the “total trajectory” of these
vernacular photographs. According to Appadurai (1988: 4), objects – like people – have
lives that circulate in different “regimes of value in space and time” resulting in different
uses and meanings. Zuromskis (2013: 11) applied this concept to American snapshot
photography, where she saw the snapshot not just as an image, but “in material and prac-
tical terms, as an object, a commodity, a set of conventions, a discourse, and a form of
cultural and political agency.” I examine the social life of vintage Iranian family photos
like caspian-girl to demonstrate just a handful of the ways they have been newly “pressed
into service” (Kuhn, 2002: 19) as they are shared digitally.3 With a focused interest in
these images as a digital objects,4 I highlight three of their many overlapping modes of
circulation and social meanings: (1) as representations of an evocative time-space for
diasporic nostalgizing; (2) as tools of soft power in public diplomacy; and (3) as sources
for what I call clickbait orientalism.
As a form of early 21st-century digital soft weaponry, clickbait orientalism trades
on orientalist tropes and simultaneously thrives on and contributes to sustained geo-
political tensions between Middle Eastern and Western publics. With the increasing
pressure on media content producers to attract attention that generates revenue
(counted by “clicks”), online news articles, photo essays, and listicles draw on the
authenticating qualities of remediated Middle Eastern family photos to promise to
shock viewers with evidence of a moment of modernity that took Western form.
Through the circulation of remediated images like caspian-girl by digital media out-
lets and content aggregators, audiences are invited – sometimes implicitly, sometimes
explicitly – to imagine both what would have happened in Iran had the 1979 revolu-
tion never occurred, as well as what could happen in the West should Iranian and/or
Malek 269

Muslim immigrants be allowed to “spread” their religion and culture, assumed to be

as monolithic as it is allegedly dangerous.

Orientalism, mediawork and the weaponization of

diasporic self-representation
Over the course of three centuries, the discourse of orientalism has been organized by
Western knowledge producers around a set of epistemological and ontological binaries
between East and West (Orient and Occident): the irrational, feminized, timeless and
exotic (Middle) Eastern “Other” as radically different from and inferior to the rational,
masculine, and dynamic West (Said, 1978). Edward Said’s groundbreaking work sparked
a lively debate among critics, including those who argued he presented a reductive and
totalizing analysis that relied too heavily on 19th-century literary sources. But the dyna-
mism of orientalism as a discourse is evident in the continued spread of its classical
tropes in new media and in the enduring power of its representations: new cultural forms
continue to contribute to and perpetuate orientalist discourses well into the 21st century.
This resiliency has led Ali Behdad and other theorists to conclude that, “Orientalism is
not a single and unchanging entity whose totalizing impulse leaves little room for discur-
sive and ideological transformation,” but rather a complex network of power relations
that “always entails re-articulations of otherness to ensure its cultural hegemony in the
face of complex political and social change” (Behdad, 2016: 168).
One way that this dynamism can be seen is through a theoretical framework Hamid
Naficy (1995) has called the mediawork about the Middle East in the West. Used to
describe the work of signifying institutions such as mass media and pop culture that act
as agents for hegemonic ideologies, one key characteristic of mediawork is that it “refor-
mats or disguises” the dominant ideologies latent in its representations. This enables the
maintenance of hegemonic consensus about the Middle East as though it were everyday
common sense rather than “a self-contained set of ‘political opinions’ or ‘biased views’”
(Naficy, 1995: 74). Distributed globally, Western mediawork closely connects entertain-
ment with power as orientalist ideologies are normalized and expressed through media to
legitimize political and military agendas.
Among the enduring discursive moves that animate these re-articulations are assump-
tions of Western moral and cultural superiority and the persistence of binary logics.
These binaries especially permeate North American and European cultural forms used as
soft power in the Middle East, both by governments through public and cultural diplo-
macy, and by non-state actors like media organizations, non-profits, and corporations.5
Such efforts aim to persuade Middle Easterners of Western superiority through music,
film, radio, and satellite TV (Aidi, 2014; Edwards, 2015; Sreberny and Torfeh, 2014)
while concurrent efforts work to convince Americans of the inferiority of Middle Eastern
and Muslim cultural characteristics through film and television, news media, and litera-
ture (Alsultany, 2012; Fayyaz and Shirazi, 2013; Said, 1997; Whitlock, 2007).
With the spread of globalization and the appearance of “democratized” digital media
platforms, voices from the Middle East and its diasporas have broadened the representa-
tions available to Western audiences. Over the last two decades a swell of books, videos,
art, and online publications have been produced by diasporic Iranians and other Middle
270 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Easterners – especially women – who aim in part to correct the misrepresentations of the
Middle East in Western mediawork. These works have tended to (re-)circulate via tradi-
tional and social media at moments of heightened geopolitical tension, for example dur-
ing the 2015 negotiation of the “Iran Deal” or the January 2020 military escalations
between Iran and the United States.
However, many of these widely disseminated efforts at recalibrating the Western
imagination of the Middle East have been charged by critics (often within the same dias-
pora) with creating Othering representations of Islam and affirming orientalist tropes of
oppressed veiled women (Bahramitash, 2005; Rastegar, 2006). Further complicating
matters, Middle Eastern cultural producers who do not prioritize Western audiences
while critiquing policies like mandatory hejab are often painted in Western media with
the same broad brush as those who do, as Behdad found: “Reviews of [contemporary
Middle Eastern artists’] works in Western media are peppered with . . . stereotypes,
underwritten by the assumption that these artists intend to speak for the oppressed women
of the region rather than speak to them” (Behdad, 2016: 167).
In her study of English-language life narratives by Middle Eastern women in the early
years of the War on Terror, Gillian Whitlock demonstrates how the experiences of indi-
viduals represented in popular memoirs like Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi, 2003)
were co-opted as “soft weapons” to produce “a careful manipulation of opinion and emo-
tion in the public sphere and a management of information in the engineering of consent”
(Whitlock, 2007: 3). Memoirs, she argues, are particularly susceptible due to their ability
to “personalize and humanize categories of people whose experiences are frequently
unseen and unheard” (2007: 3). As a result, these books “trigger[ed] conversations and
interactions across cultures in conflict” (Whitlock, 2007: 3) as the authors may have
intended, but also were co-opted to justify the War on Terror in ways reminiscent of
colonialist claims of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988).
Approaching this issue directly, in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Lila Abu-Lughod
(2013) demonstrated that the soft power approach of co-opting Muslim women’s narra-
tives has also included the mobilization of orientalist imagery, where the use of photo-
graphs of women – whether on book covers or in PR campaigns – worked in tandem with
texts to present cultural justifications for post-9/11 military intervention. Similarly, Dana
Cloud’s analysis of the role played by photojournalists’ images of Afghan women after
9/11 led her to argue that these photographs should be seen as part of public diplomacy
enacted by American media like Time and the New York Times (Cloud, 2002). Joining
these depictions of contemporary Afghan women, snapshots from the 1960s and 1970s
have also circulated online, purporting to show a secular past and thus similarity with the
West (Shams, 2017; Warren, 2017). These vintage snapshots often are juxtaposed with
images of the present (“before-and-after”) to depict a stark difference and encourage the
American public to support continued intervention.
Taken together, these analyses identify a key concern in a larger set of critiques of
diasporic self-representations that appear to offer a stamp of “insider” authenticity to
those who have kept Afghanistan and Iran in their crosshairs for over four decades.
While the range of representations and intentions of their creators may have grown
with Web 2.0, it is in this broader landscape that images and stories that connect geo-
political moments to individual experience go viral. The media may be new, but the
well-trodden messages remain familiar: that Middle Eastern women are oppressed,
Malek 271

Islam is responsible, and the West therefore must intervene to “save” them and to pre-
vent migration from abroad and “Islamification” at home.

Authenticity and family photos in the global attention

economy
What happens when family snapshots are digitized and made public, entering the global
visual economy as representations of a people, politics, time, and place? Numerous studies
have shown how the social practices and meanings of snapshots have shifted as the pre-
dominant modes of making, storing, and circulating photography have moved from analog
to digital. This digital shift entails new uses of vernacular photographs in public spheres,
particularly as a means of communication on digital platforms (Keightley and Pickering,
2014). While analog presentations like photo albums are in some ways mimicked and in
other ways altered by digital platforms that enable broader dissemination, digital circula-
tion is still centered in many ways on memory and sharing: posting photos or videos to
social media contributes to ongoing social and political relations by enabling shared mean-
ing creation (Balbi et al., 2016: 9). These new uses can also reconfigure identity, for exam-
ple through self-promotion in public or semi-public online settings (Palmer, 2010).
Whether through analog or digital albums, this sharing of images in meaning creation
is one of the many ongoing processes of exchange that photographs undergo as objects
in circulation. In her study of British family photos made public in news media, Gillian
Rose showed that, even prior to the digital shift, the publication of family images moved
them “from one set of circuits and sites in the visual economy to another,” from intimate
social relations where they are not overtly commodified to an “anonymous and abstracted”
public sphere where they can become so (Rose, 2010: 72). Although recontextualized
snapshots circulate online more quickly than in the traditional media formats Rose stud-
ied, they too undergo commodification, and perhaps even more intensely as they encoun-
ter the online attention economy.6 Like the unintended consequences of circulating life
narratives described above, photographers or copyright owners may not circulate family
images online with a goal of profit, but when photos are deemed “eye-grabbing” they
become key currency for content aggregators whose business model is based on the
prospect of virality and continued circulation.
Family photos from pre-revolutionary Iran assert authenticity and thus value for digital
publishers by affirming the hegemonic discourses of orientalism and by conforming to
relatable family photo conventions. The shared imperative to photograph moments of cel-
ebration, leisure, and rites of passage (“Kodak moments”) has created a selection of com-
mon views that simultaneously limits the representational scope of a family’s album while
also creating familiarity for external viewers (Spence and Holland, 1991). As Zuromskis
demonstrated, snapshots have become both a “prescriptive cultural ritual” (2013: 9) and,
through their indexicality, a seemingly “undeniable assurance that, to quote Roland Barthes’
famous phrase, ‘that has been’” (Zuromskis, 2013: 314). Popular misunderstandings of the
20th century as a time before Photoshop, and thus before photo modification, reassure
contemporary audiences that mid-century family snapshots offer a truthful glimpse of
“how it really was.” This authenticity is further confirmed by the traces of now-outdated
technology retained in digitization (grainy textures, white trim edges, black-and-white or
272 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

washed-out color), even if these characteristics and the front-facing poses they capture
actually point to the many ways photographs are always selective constructions. As Tina
Campt (2009: 90) has shown, even when not overtly altered, the images usually selected
for family albums and for public remediation tend to be those which depict the family’s
history as its members wish to be seen, rather than “how it really was.” Once decontextual-
ized, anonymized, and placed in new narratives in digital circulation, this very selective set
of images becomes meaningful in the global visual economy through the authenticating
power of family photographs despite these selecting processes.
As with all media, viewing family photographs is always intertextual. This was rec-
ognized by Annette Kuhn (2002), who showed that “memories evoked by a photo do not
simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in a network, an intertext, of
discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these
and cultural contexts, historical moments” (2002: 14). By examining the circulations,
re-articulations, and commodification of Middle Eastern family photos, I heed
Zuromskis’s call to go beyond the contents of these snapshots to examine their social
lives, including “the various and shifting social contingencies that give the image mean-
ing” (2013: 11). In its anonymized 21st-century digital circulation as a vintage photo-
graph, caspian-girl for some viewers is a source of nostalgia; for others a snapshot of a
pretty girl at the beach. But the persistent power of orientalist discourses in Western
mediawork also has provided a key context for the public interpretation and continued
circulation of this photo from the Middle East.
One way that political contexts and social contingencies have operated as caspian-girl
circulates through the attention economy is through what I have termed clickbait orien-
talism. Clickbait describes an internet text and/or image designed to attract clicks by
generating a “curiosity gap” through keywords or eye-catching photos that trigger emo-
tional responses like surprise, anger, or disbelief in order to generate advertising revenue
(Gardiner, 2015). Clickbait photos, in particular, are featured on global viral publishers’
websites (e.g. 9GAG, imgur) where users upload and/or share images, often memes; in
advertising on journalism websites (e.g. CNN, Business Insider); and on aggregator
websites that collect web content to repackage, republish, and resell it (e.g. All That’s
Interesting). When drawing upon images of the Middle East, in this case Iran, this form
of co-optation focuses on the re-packaging of content from memoirs, personal essays,
family photos, and other forms of authenticated ‘evidence’ to draw attention by high-
lighting similarities and differences that shock viewers and show the presumed danger of
contemporary Iran and Iranians to Western democratic life. Taken together, the resulting
blog posts, slideshows, listicles, and social media posts work to promote and, literally,
sell orientalist binaries.
In his 1995 study, Naficy analyzed television news, sitcoms, jokes, and even pro-
wrestling to show how American mediawork about Iran since 1979 involved “cultural
dispersal and economic commodification” that enlarged the “repertoire of stereotypes”
of Iranians as Others, thereby making possible “a gradual but significant modification”
of manifest forms without a fundamental change to their latent orientalist ideology
(Naficy, 1995: 82). Following Naficy, I argue that clickbait orientalism constitutes a
2010s continuation of this mediawork, forming a new iteration of the well-established
approach of using women’s bodies, dress, and rights to legitimize imperialism and justify
Malek 273

Figure 2. Screenshot of a user-submitted family photo in Iranian.com’s Nostalgia section in 2005.

Western military intervention in the Middle East. Below, I trace the circulation of cas-
pian-girl by drawing out three of the many overlapping representational modes in the
circulation of remediated Iranian family archives: as nostalgia, as public diplomacy, and
as viral journalism, concluding with a further remediation that reminds us that digital
ciriculation is ongoing and social meanings are never fixed.

Digital diasporic archives and the sharing of nostalgia

The global trend of posting vintage photos online, usually with a positive or wistful nos-
talgic lens, has become a social media phenomenon with its own hashtags: #vintage,
#nostalgia, #throwback. While Middle Easterners have participated by posting digitized
vintage images from their homes in Cairo, Beirut, or Istanbul, this type of engagement in
the Iranian new media landscape began in the diaspora (see Ryzova, 2015). Early contri-
butions to the Nostalgia section of diaspora hub Iranian.com (Figure 2) – popular from
the late 1990s through the mid-2000s – included scans of family photos among digitized
ephemera like magazine covers, advertisements, film posters, and newspaper clippings.
These were joined in the 2010s by posts to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram (Figure 3), both by the diaspora and by Iranians in Iran.
When brought together as nostalgic collections of pre-revolutionary images, the digital
scans of pop stars and modern cityscapes mix with snapshots of urban Iranians with stylish
haircuts, bellbottom pants, and, often, British and American cars. The effect is the depiction
274 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Figure 3. Two 2015 Instagram posts by Ajam Media Collective, featuring scanned images with
captions submitted to the Ajam Digital Archive.

of a young society living what appear to be carefree, affluent, and modern lives that closely
resemble urban Western youth of the same period.7 This is a reflection of the media of the
time but, also, in family photos, the intersection of socioeconomic class (e.g. those with
access to point-and-shoot cameras) and socio-religious disposition: individuals from con-
servative families may choose to avoid publicly displaying their snapshots (online or oth-
erwise) in order to honor the privacy of the unveiled family members who appear in them.
Iranians in Iran and immigrants in diaspora may contribute, seek out, and respond to
such photos to confirm their family narratives, validate similar experiences, and show
the rest of the world the Iran they knew and lived. Second-generation Iranians (the chil-
dren of immigrants) may share family photos to communicate identity but also to submit
a corrective to Western media images of Iran that contrast significantly with their fami-
ly’s photos (Figures 4 and 5). Non-Iranians seek out these images as well, whether as
nostalgic former expats or as curious individuals looking to learn.
The broad appetite for these images has led to articles beyond diaspora-focused outlets
to intermediaries such as Tehran Bureau, a specialized independent news site affiliated
first with PBS in the US (2009–13) and later with The Guardian UK (2013–16). Tehran
Malek 275

Figure 4. Screenshot of a photo essay on The Guardian website featuring contributed family
photos, shared over 13,000 times as of July 2018.

Bureau featured Iran-focused content including photo essays like, “Iranian fashion:
between the veils” (Figure 4). Referring to the period between 1939, when the veil was
temporarily banned, and 1983, when the veil was made compulsory (Milani, 1992: 38),
the text pitches the essay to Western audiences (including diaspora members), describing
its focus on “family albums [that] capture Iranian women’s embrace of western fashion”
(Niknejad, 2014). The essay thus seeks to enable diasporic nostalgizing while also
responding to mediawork that has pitted Iran and Iranians in opposition to the West.
Iranians’ social media posts also circulate vintage photos, often incorporating per-
sonal memories, identifying family members, and sometimes also making claims on
truth. For example, in a Twitter thread reacting to protests in Iran in December 2017, user
@ritapanahi tweeted a series of family photos intermixed with public pre-revolutionary
images. One of her snapshots (Figure 5) is a black-and-white photo presented as public
evidence of women in pre-1979 Iran as “professional, independent, and free” – with the
authorizing and authenticating English tweet, “This is my mum & her friends in Iran
before the Islamic revolution.” Liked by 26,756 users as of July 2018, the tweet responded
to political realities in contemporary Iran, but also to Western representations of Iranian
women as primordially oppressed, posing a challenge to the flattening effect of most
post-1979 depictions.
These online circulations of vintage Iranian snapshots enable memory work for dias-
pora Iranians by contributing to collective memory and social meaning creation in ways
that expand on the impacts of the analog album. In a promotional essay for Iranian.com,
the creator of the Iran Before the Chador project (Figure 6) described how such albums
had been integral to his identity formation as a diaspora child:

My good old days are the days my family would sit and tell me about theirs, in Iran before the
revolution. They would laugh and cry and show me old photos. . .. [W]hen I look at these old
photos of my family in Iran, I get a feeling I assume is close to how home feels. . .. (Music,
2011b)
276 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Figure 5. A viral tweet by user @ritapanahi, December 2017.

Figure 6. Screenshot of beforethechador.com/preview as captured in July 2018.

Malek 277

The creator of the project is an Iranian-American rap artist who goes by the name
Malkovich Music (MM); the photos he selected were taken before he was born. Initially,
he told me, MM was drawn to digitizing meaningful family photos strictly for preserva-
tion purposes. But once he started, he discovered images he liked for aesthetic qualities,
and eventually he visited each of his mother’s seven siblings in Los Angeles seeking
access to their suitcases full of snapshots and home movies. Inspired, he created a project
dedicated to the memory of his grandfather (“a love letter to my family”) that began with
a website and that he hopes will culminate in a book.
According to MM, his one-day exhibition featuring 30 photographs was a last-minute
idea primarily intended to bring out a crowd for his latest music video shoot. Since only
friends and family had attended this short exhibition, in our interview MM made it clear
that online press from mainstream outlets like the Atlantic had been far more impactful
in the long-term. He was pleased with this exposure and was not bothered that these
articles sometimes centered on the trope of “looking behind the veil”; after all, this had
been invited by his title, Iran Before the Chador. In our interview, MM was aware but
unconcerned that Iranian women wore chadors (a floor-length cloth covering that envel-
ops the back of the head) centuries before the 1979 revolution. He was convinced that
viewers knew what he meant by the title, and, smiling, he added: “It rhymes.”
MM’s lack of concern for historical specificity in the circulation of his family’s pho-
tographs reflects his priorities. As an independent musician who describes himself as “a
homeless traveling rapper on a permanent world tour,” MM’s work to self-promote and
create exposure through Before the Chador was motivated in part by a need to build an
audience (Music, 2019). When I asked how he curated his exhibition from what he
described as several hundred photos at his disposal, he replied, “I didn’t think about it too
much. Just good-looking stuff.” MM recognized the potential draw of intimate images of
what is often referred to in Western media as a “hidden” Iran; from the outset, these
images entered the public sphere in order to garner attention.
After the image of MM’s aunt – caspian-girl – went viral, MM said his family had not
understood what that meant, nor why that popularity had not translated to financial
returns. Why hadn’t their ownership of the image, noted in a copyright watermark, led to
usage fees? Putting the issue of digital ownership and the quick decontextualization of
viral images momentarily aside, MM’s website also does not display ads nor does it
appear to generate revenue. As part of the growing young precariat, MM’s desire for
exposure as an end in itself was one that his family did not recognize as potentially more
valuable to him than immediate monetization.
Though MM insisted that his motivations for sharing these images did not include
redressing mainstream representations of Iran, his website’s project description of a time
before the 1979 revolution nevertheless suggests that his title choice was more than
rhythmic, or only exposure-seeking: “[B]efore the government told people how to dress,
before home became prison, before fear became part of the Iranian heart and soul”
(Music, 2011a). MM’s focus on the chador as symbolic of a time “after,” marked by fear
and repression, reveals his view of the revolution (and that of many others in diaspora)
but also directly connects to a long history of orientalist tropes presenting Middle Eastern
women’s bodies and attire as symbols of oppression. MM’s title choice thus must also be
viewed in the context of US media representations since the 1980s that have focused
278 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

disproportionately on images of veiled Muslim women (Chan-Malik, 2011), and in a

2010s context of continuing US rhetoric clamoring for “Iran next.”
Furthermore, the project’s title explicitly guides viewers to notice the sartorial choices
of the women in these photos, especially the lack of veils. It is never made explicit
whether or not MM’s Jewish family members ever chose to veil in Iran at the time,
though many Muslim women did.8 Nor is it ever mentioned that Iranian women – like all
people – make sartorial choices appropriate to their social and cultural contexts, includ-
ing chadors: the same woman may have chosen to wear a chador to run an errand and a
bathing suit to the beach. In fact, the two people also leaning on the car in the caspian-girl
image are actually wearing chadors: the individual closest to the camera has pulled her
white floral chador to her waist, perhaps to take in the sun, while her companion still
wears hers on her head, perhaps to shield herself from the sun.
In offering his family’s album to the public, MM has contributed an important coun-
ter-image to the dark chador-heavy media representations of Iran that focus on Islam and
erase religious minorities’ experiences. But in generalizing their experiences and center-
ing the chador in hopes of garnering wider attention, he created other gaps of representa-
tion that are specific to his family’s intersections of class, religion, and social position.
Lacking these contextual details, caspian-girl and the other photographs MM promoted
online are made to represent the larger Iranian population when they of course only offer
a glimpse at moments of leisure of an urban, apparently affluent, Iranian Jewish family.

Public diplomacy and soft weapons

Press for Before the Chador extended well past the exhibition and included international
digital outlets like Spanish-language BBC Mundo, Portuguese-language BBC Brasil,
and Persian-language BBC Persian and Radio Farda. Each of these is funded by Western
governments as part of their efforts at public diplomacy, constituting important avenues
of soft power used to communicate to foreign publics.
After 9/11 and 7/7, both the US and UK recommitted to public diplomacy and soft
power by increasing funding for programs targeting the Middle East. The potential of
digital media in these efforts has been harnessed by governments through the expansion
of satellite television programming, website development, and social media engagement.
In the UK, the BBC World Service has broadcast “the word and worldview of the metro-
politan center” under the “aura of impartiality” created by the larger BBC brand for over
70 years (Baumann et al., 2011: 135–7). According to Baumann et al. (2011: 136), con-
tent produced and circulated by over 30 language services of the BBC World Service
therefore conduct not only linguistic translations but cultural translations as well.
In the BBC World Service’s online coverage of Before the Chador on three separate
foreign-language arms, caspian-girl was used as the cover image of a slideshow of MM’s
family photos. Attention to variations between accompanying text written for Western-
language audiences and those for Persian-language audiences reveal how these BBC
outlets used family photos as soft weapons through cultural translation.
Whereas the BBC Persian headline for caspian-girl offers a literal translation of
“Before the Chador” (Ghabl az chador), the Spanish headline of BBC Mundo, read: “In
photos: a trip without veils to pre-revolutionary Iran” (BBC Mundo, 2011). Here the
Malek 279

Figure 7. Screenshots from 2011 photo galleries on BBC Persian and BBC Mundo featuring
caspian-girl, with captions.

“peek” trope is deployed through reference to time travel, with the clickbaity sub-head:
“Unthinkable images of an Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution.” Similarly, the cap-
tion for caspian-girl in the BBC Persian gallery reads simply, “Weekend break at the
Caspian seaside, 1963,” a close translation of MM’s caption. On BBC Mundo, however,
the Spanish caption adds editorialized explanatory text: “Before the Islamic revolution of
1979, before the arrival of the chador (a type of veil used by Muslim women), it was pos-
sible to find young women like the one in the photo, with a completely different concep-
tion of the body” (Figure 7). Despite MM’s confidence, his title has been taken literally
and transferred to this authoritative caption, announcing the arrival of the chador in 1979
and thereby erasing centuries of presence – including in the very image it captions.
Further, the caption suggests it would be impossible that this woman or her entire “con-
ception of the body” could be present in Iran today. That the author presumes to know
280 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

what any woman’s conception of her body is from a single image, let alone that of mil-
lions of contemporary Iranian women, rests on normative assumptions of East/West bina-
ries and associated gender norms. In its phrasing, the caption silently refers to orientalist
representations of oppressed women whose freedom is entirely bound up with their dress,
putting forward as common sense the notion that Iran has reverted to a pre-modern era.
Captions like these reveal the ways Before the Chador was used as a source of author-
ized misinformation in public diplomacy by relying on MM’s snapshots and authenti-
cated voice as an “insider.” These representations create a sense of relatability to an
Iranian past by both drawing from and contributing to orientalist and Islamophobic dis-
courses. When these kinds of normative appraisals and erroneous content come from the
BBC – with its “aura of impartiality” – it is perhaps not surprising to find that other
sources have expressed them in even more audacious ways.

Clickbait orientalism: selling shocking similarity and

difference in blogs and viral journalism
The circulation of caspian-girl moved quickly from MM’s website and publicity to listi-
cles, blogs, and photo essays. Highlighted on its own – first as The Atlantic’s Daily Dish
“Face of the Day” and later on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter – caspian-girl eventually
became used as clickbait on viral publishing sites like 9GAG, imgur, Bored Panda, and
ebaumsworld. Used without credit, MM’s content copyright has been ignored and the
image cropped to remove his watermark. Worse, some viral publishers added their own
watermarks, to MM’s great frustration. These kinds of posts are dominated by advertising
and circulated quickly across social media thanks to captions and headlines with sensation-
alized, curiosity-gap-forming text like, “You May Not Believe it, But it’s Iran in 1960s.”
These uses of caspian-girl fall in line with a trend of re-circulating Iranian family
photographs alongside photojournalism to demonstrate similarity between everyday
lives in pre-revolutionary Iran and the present West. Articles and photo essays employ
clichéd metaphors of seeing behind, beyond, or under the veil to draw audiences to click
on slideshows offering peeks into Iran. For example, in a 2017 Daily MailOnline “round-
up” of vintage photos from the internet, clickbait language and orientalist veil metaphors
promised “surprising,” “stunning,” images of “an unseen side of a country” that has been
“long . . . shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.” Boasting over 5300 shares, the
extended title of the photo essay explicitly highlights dances and fashions relatable to
Western viewers: “From locals doing the ‘Tehran twist’ to students sporting mullets and
miniskirts: Fascinating photos reveal life in Iran before the revolution” (Leach, 2017).
English-language comments on these types of articles often dismally marvel that the
chadored masses of the nightly news once looked so much “like us.”
A 2014 photo essay from All That’s Interesting, a media website that curates “viral-
oriented content” for ad revenue (Figure 8),9 offers another example of the way text and
image are deployed to shock viewers with similarities:

These fascinating photos of Iran before 1979 reveal just how similar the country was to the
Western nations that are now its enemies.. . . [T]here once was a time when the streets of
Tehran mirrored those of, say, L.A., and national leaders would engage in discourse that
consisted of more than sighs, sanctions and spats. (Cox, 2014)
Malek 281

Figure 8. Screenshot of All That’s Interesting photo essay featuring a highly circulated
photograph of Iranian women, usually dated 1971, source uncredited. Two advertisements have
been cropped from this screenshot.

This opening paragraph sets a familiar oppositional binary of Iran today and a time-
less set of “Western nations,” especially the United States, reflecting a contemporary
amnesia about decades of close US–Iran relations, let alone how those relations emerged.
A Tehran that “mirrored . . . L.A.” is presented as a time-space when popular fashions
were from the West and Iranian leaders were pliable to American will. In this framing,
modernity is only recognizable through wholesale consumption of Western norms,
desires, products, and discourses – evident in the “fascinating photos” that follow.
Bloggers and social media users sharing caspian-girl also added politicized and sen-
sationalized captions that interpreted MM’s aunt as a secular, liberated woman in an
illiberal place. Like in the BBC Mundo caption above, some textually tempted the viewer
to imagine the fate of such a woman in Iran today, while others, like this South African
blogger, stated it outright: “Iran, 1960. [sic] She might be sentenced to death if wearing
this in public today” (McCleland, 2014). These set-ups anonymize MM’s aunt in an
imagined space wherein her own agency, desires, actions, and thoughts (“conception of
her body”) are presumed to be wholly Western, simply by virtue of her beach attire.
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2007) have theorized the process by which
iconic images become symbols in the West, beginning with a transition to anonymity
that, “always shifts the emphasis from individual experience to social types, characteris-
tic responses, and collective obligations” (2007: 90). Blog and social media posts that
featured caspian-girl among the many photos of pre-revolutionary Iran without credit
anonymized the pictured girl while adding “characteristic responses”: orientalist binaries
transmitted through Western mediawork as taken-for-granted evidence of the inferiority
of post-revolutionary Iran. For example, an American blogger deployed this “common
282 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

sense” in 2015: “As you can see, the now conflict-torn and chaotic nation of Iran was
once just as luxurious and normal as even our country. . .. At one time, the leaders of
these countries [Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq] could rationalize better than they can now; they
weren’t insane” (Cline, 2015). These kinds of textual emphases of the visual symbolism
that the anonymous image is made to represent push viewers towards specific political
aims and, as Hariman and Lucaites predicted, collective action.
This collective action was not only directed at influencing foreign policy towards
Iran; in other instances, caspian-girl was used to express domestic concerns within
Western societies. In re-tweets by social aggregator accounts and individual users shar-
ing caspian-girl, accompanying text drew out comparisons between today’s “insane” and
“chaotic” Iran and its imaged “normal” past – but ultimately to serve as a cautionary tale
for the West. For example, popular American comedian Sarah Silverman’s 2015 tweet of
the photo garnered nearly 3000 likes as it warned about women’s rights in the United
States: “Before u scoff at women saying their rights are not-so-slowly being taken away,
take a look at 1960’s Iran” (Figure 9). In a similar but more explicitly Islamophobic
example, a 2014 Swedish tweet called upon users’ received stereotypes of present-day
Iran to imagine a future Sweden: “Iranian woman before the Islamic Revolution in 1960,
what does Iran look like today? Should we have this development in Sweden? #svpol”
(Figure 9). Texts and captions like these prompt imagined outcomes in the West if inter-
vention does not deter encroaching Iranian geopolitical power, silently recalling decades
of media-stoked fears of “creeping Shariah.”
As these tweets illustrate, caspian-girl had become anonymized but symbolic, and thus
what Hariman and Lucaites (2007: 88) would call an individuated aggregate, representing
“neither everywoman and everyman nor specific persons with names and stories.” The
result of this simultaneously personal and social abstraction, they argue, is an emotional

Figure 9. Two Twitter shares of caspian-girl as domestic political commentary.

Malek 283

response. Since clickbait seeks attention through creating such an emotional response,
caspian-girl became a particularly effective source of content, especially when combined
with sensationalized text and images drawing before-and-after comparisons. A post to
“alternative news” website beforeitsnews.com titled, “Iranian Time Warp! A Side of Iran
You Have Never Seen, or Even Imagined! Shocking Photos You Won’t Forget!” is exem-
plary (Figure 10). Again, the accompanying text promises to shock by revealing an Iran
beyond viewers’ imaginations – only accessible through metaphors of science fiction – that
“reveal[s] what will happen to the USA if we don’t take control!” The post continues:

What you are about to see will shock you. And it won’t just shock you, it will literally stun you.
I have seen these pictures before, and still, my jaw drops whenever I look at them. It saddens
me to see a people so free and so happy, and in only such a short amount of time, in bondage,
angry and miserable. (Leahz, 2014)

These binaries of freedom/bondage and happiness/misery are reportedly evidenced

by a series of uncaptioned and uncredited family photos, magazine covers, and

Figure 10. Screenshot of a 2014 post on beforeitsnews.com.

284 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

professional photos of young people in 1960s–1970s Iran – including caspian-girl. This

exact series of photos, collected from listicles and social media posts, was repeated on at
least six other viral publishing websites. This one, however, also includes a set of uncap-
tioned “after” photographs, depicting veiled Iranian women: sitting on steps reading
books, triumphantly protesting during the 2009 Green Movement, mourning blanketed
earthquake victims, and smiling for a group photo. The accompanying text is a passion-
ate call to action for American Christians to prevent the spread of misery and bondage
that the author sees as obvious in these juxtaposed images.
These examples demonstrate that the digital co-optations of family snapshots trade on
orientalist tropes and the indexical power of family photographs. When further remedi-
ated by content aggregators, bloggers, social media users, and contributors looking to
monetize the “curiosity gap” created by manipulating Western audiences’ emotions,
these digitized snapshots of family moments become anonymous, symbolic, weaponized,
and monetized in the global visual economy.

Ongoing circulations
As Kuhn keenly observed, “there can be no last word . . . about any photograph” (2002:
19). A decade after it was originally uploaded, caspian-girl continues to circulate online,
generating new meanings and remediations. In 2019, the Iranian nostalgia Instagram
account @CafeNostal posted a colorized version of the photo without attribution or credit
(Figure 11). Garnering 20,799 likes, the long, poetic caption in Persian mixes sea and
automobile metaphors to build sensory nostalgia as it describes the image through the
historical confluences that it conjures for an Iranian generation about to realize the

Figure 11. Instagram post by Iranian nostalgia account @cafenostal of a digitally colorized
version of caspian-girl, January 2019.
Malek 285

“failures and false faces of what lies ahead.” Of hundreds of shares of caspian-girl, this
Persian caption is the only instance I found that mentioned the two chadored women when
describing the scene. It does so not because they are shocking, but because they are mun-
dane: that chadors coexist with bathing suits is, for Iranian audiences, unremarkable.
Indeed, these global circulations of MM’s photo have never only been about dias-
pora, nor only viewed in the West; they have always included audiences in Iran. This
was also affirmed when caspian-girl re-emerged in yet another form through the work
of artist Soheila Sokhanvari (Figure 12). A visual artist who was born in Iran but expe-
rienced the 1979 revolution from her British boarding school, Sokhanvari’s award-
winning work uses family photographs as sources to investigate “the concept of
collective trauma as an experience that can be told through the narratives of individu-
als” (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 2015). As part of her artistic practice, Sokhanvari
selects photos from pre-1979 Iran – largely from her own family archive – and draws
them repeatedly, manipulating details by using colors, patterns, and non-traditional
materials (e.g. crude oil, gold, her hair) to literally weave together the individual,
familial, national, and geopolitical.
To collect additional images for her artistic practice, she told me, Sokhanvari asked
relatives in Iran for photographs from their family archives. Her cousin sent the digitized
caspian-girl file not because of its place in a family album, but because like so many oth-
ers around the world, she too had come across it online. But the pictured girl was not just
an anonymous figure to her cousin; she recognized her as a school friend, one with whom
she had lost touch in the tumultuous years that followed their girlhood. In its life as a
digital image, caspian-girl had circulated as nostalgia, public diplomacy, clickbait, but
also – and again – as an aide-memoire, this time of a lost friend.
Sokhanvari’s remediation of caspian-girl moved it to the offline spaces of the exhibi-
tion wall, demonstrating the continued interplay of analog and digital forms in the social

Figure 12. Three 2015 remediations of caspian-girl by Soheila Sokhanvari, each titled
“Shahrzad.”
286 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

life of this image. But even in her quite personal artistic practice, she chose to re-
anonymize the pictured girl, titling her work “Shahrzad” after the female storyteller in
One Thousand and One Nights. In this newly remediated form, MM’s aunt has become
the sole person in the image but remains an individuated aggregate, at once personal and
impersonal, individual and collective. According to Sokhanvari: “I think the women in
Iran are all Shahrzads – we’ve all got stories to tell.” As caspian-girl illustrates, however,
once shared, the future meanings of those stories and the photos they accompany, like the
future uses of archives, are never foretold.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. On the anti-collection in digital spaces, see Van der Veer Martens (2011) “Approaching the
anti-collection.”
2. Remediation is “a formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (Bolter and
Grusin, 1999: 273).
3. I use vintage here following studies of snapshot photography (e.g. Zuromskis, 2013).
According to Niemeyer, “Today, vintage is mainly something that was created in the past and
whose qualities remain in the present despite or thanks to signs and traces of the passage of
time . . .” (2015: 91).
4. While these images also have a “social life” as analog photos, my tracing follows their reme-
diation as digital images posted online.
5. According to Joseph Nye, soft power works through co-optation rather than coercion to influ-
ence others, usually through cultural forms that create an attraction to shared values and ideals
(Nye, 2004: 4–7).
6. Attention economy describes market competition for the limited resource of human attention,
especially though not exclusively online (Davenport and Beck, 2001).
7. These nostalgic photos are selected to highlight “the good old days” and thus rarely include
divisive or overtly negative images of war, violence, or poverty.
8. Lior Sternfeld (2018) estimates that, in the decades prior to 1979, the Jewish population in
Iran “hovered at around 100,000.” On veiling among Iranian Jewish women, see Soomekh
(2012).
9. See the PBH Network entry on Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pbh-
network#section-overview. PBH is the parent company of All That’s Interesting.

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Author biography
Amy Malek is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in cultural production, memory, and citi-
zenship in the Iranian diaspora. She is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the College
of Charleston and Associate Research Scholar at the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center
for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University.