This conversation on December 7, 2023 with From Slander’s Brand artist Hannah Darabi and historian Kelly McCormick explored Darabi’s critical project on the photo books published during the early years of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 recapturing the potential that revolutionaries and governments saw in photographs. Through Darabi’s work we uncover the possibilities and limits of photographs as they are changed, manipulated, and turned into icons.

Presented in collaboration with Critical Image Forum, UBC, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Hannah Darabi is an Iranian artist and photographer. She studied at Tehran’s College of Fine Arts and then at the University of Paris VIII-Saint-Denis. Although she now lives in Paris, her country of origin remains the main subject of most of her photographic series, in which her photographs interact with other materials, such as text, archival images, music and objects, to show the unique political situation and economic conditions in her country. Among many honors, in 2019, Enghelab Street, a Revolution Through Books, Iran 1979-1983 earned the Historical Book Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles; and in 2023 Hannah Darabi was granted the Bernd and Hila Becher Promotion Prize by the City of Düsseldorf for her outstanding contribution to photographic art.

Kelly Midori McCormick is a historian of Japanese photography whose work explores the way that Japanese women photographers turned to photography to support or critique the state from the 1930s to the 1980s. Her book in progress, The Cameraman in a Skirt: The Making of Modern Japanese Photography addresses how in the 1960s and 1970s women photographers transformed the camera into a tool turned against the state and corporations as they photographed protest, pollution events, and the Women’s Liberation movement.

Banner Image: Alison Boulier