When visual artist Azadeh Akhlaghi began staging photographs of pivotal moments in Iranian history, she thought that with enough research, she could uncover the truth of each moment.
By the end, she wasn’t so sure.
“I found so many contradictions in the records. In interviews, people censor themselves. There are historical documents from the secret police of the Shah that even now the government wouldn’t give me,” Akhlaghi said. “You can never really find the truth.”
An exhibit of Akhlaghi’s work, “From Iran: A Visual Testimony,” opened early this month at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and runs through March 21.
The staged photographs cover a period from 1908, when the Russian-led Cossack Brigade bombarded Iran’s parliament during the Constitutional Revolution, to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Drawing from archival research, interviews, and her background in cinema, Akhlaghi recreated 11 incidents from Iranian’s tumultuous 20th-century history at a panoramic scale — the largest of the images spans 3 feet by 15 feet.
