Freedom

This actually looks like a staged photograph one would find at a fine art gallery in New York or Philadelphia. The facial expressions are tremendous, each one different from the next. The hand gestures add an additional layer of emotion and subjectivity.

Tehran, Then and Now

As Carla Parks of Foreign Policy puts it, "when Westerners think of Iran today, images of women wearing chadors, American flags burning, and militant crowds shouting nationalistic slogans often come to mind." It was, however, not always thus.

Parks' Foreign Policy photo essay, Once Upon a Time in Tehran, puts on display a city that once was, but no longer exists outside the memory of those who walked the streets of the modern pre-Revolution Tehran. What is truly striking about these photographs is how they seem as if they could have been shot in any American city during the 1970s. Needless to say, such a societal parallel is now just a distant memory.

The story of Tehran's descent from cultural bastion to Theocratic stronghold is reminiscent of Berlin's in the early 20th century. Let us hope that the former can break through its tyrannical chains without the bloodshed that accompanied the latter's accomplishment of this feat.