You’ve seen them. Scroll through any "vintage" subreddit or Pinterest board and they’ll pop up: pictures of iran in the 70s featuring women in miniskirts, students lounging at Tehran University, and neon signs for Pepsi and Chevy. It’s a specific kind of digital nostalgia that feels almost like an alternate dimension. For some, these images are a painful reminder of a lost "Paris of the Middle East." For others, they’re a simplified, Westernized snapshot that ignores the brewing storm underneath.
They’re jarring. Truly.
When you look at a photo of a woman with a beehive hairdo walking down Pahlavi Avenue, you’re not just looking at a fashion choice. You’re looking at a geopolitical pressure cooker. Honestly, the obsession with these photos says as much about our current world as it does about the Iran of fifty years ago. People use them to argue about modern politics, religious freedom, and the "progress" of history. But if you look closer, the reality caught in the grain of those 35mm slides is way more complicated than just "they used to dress like us."
The Tehran That Looked Like Los Angeles
In the mid-70s, Tehran was basically the construction capital of the world. Money was everywhere. Thanks to the 1973 oil crisis, the Shah was flush with cash, and he spent it like there was no tomorrow.
If you find pictures of Iran in the 70s taken in the capital, you’ll notice the architecture first. It wasn't all ancient mosques. You had the InterContinental Hotel (now the Laleh), designed with a sleek, international modernist flair. You had the Arya-Mehr Stadium, which looked like it belonged in the Olympics.
Life for the urban elite was fast. You’ve got photos of people skiing in Tochal, then driving down to a discotheque in the evening. It’s weirdly familiar to a Western eye. You see the bell-bottoms. You see the Ray-Bans. You see the records—Googoosh was the undisputed queen of the scene, blending Persian lyrics with funk and pop beats that sounded like they came straight out of a London studio. She was a fashion icon, and her "mullet" haircut (the dokhtar-ooneh) was copied by thousands of young Iranian women.
But here is the thing: that was one slice of life. A very visible, very photographed slice.
If you traveled just a few miles south of the fancy districts or out into the provinces like Sistan and Baluchestan, the 70s looked nothing like a disco. It looked like the 19th century. This massive gap—this jarring economic whiplash—is what the photos often miss. The glossy magazines like Zan-e Ruz (Woman of Today) showed the miniskirts, but they didn't show the shantytowns.
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The Politics Behind the Lens
We have to talk about why these photos exist in the first place. The Pahlavi dynasty was obsessed with its image. They wanted the world to see Iran as a modern, secular, Western-aligned powerhouse.
So, many pictures of iran in the 70s were essentially PR. The Shah’s government encouraged a certain look. They wanted to project "The Great Civilization." When you see photos of the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire at Persepolis in 1971, you’re seeing the peak of this. It was the most expensive party in history. Maxim’s of Paris catered it. They flew in 50,000 songbirds from Europe (most of which died in the desert heat).
It was a flex.
But while the photos showed a gleaming, secular paradise, the political reality was tightening. The SAVAK (secret police) was everywhere. You could be arrested for having the wrong book or saying the wrong thing at a cafe. The photos show the smiles, but they don't show the fear. This is the nuance that usually gets lost when these images go viral. People see the freedom of dress and assume it meant total freedom. It didn't. It was a trade-off: social liberalization in exchange for absolute political loyalty to the Crown.
The Googoosh Effect and Pop Culture
If you want to understand the vibe of 1970s Iran, you have to listen to the music that goes with the pictures. It wasn't just Western imitation. It was a weird, beautiful hybrid.
Kourosh Yaghmaei was doing psychedelic rock that rivaled anything coming out of San Francisco. Farhad Mehrad was singing gritty, soulful songs about social injustice. The film industry, known as Film Farsi, was pumping out movies that were half-Bollywood, half-Italian Neorealism.
When you see a photo of a movie theater in 1975 Tehran, the posters are for Jaws right next to a local drama starring Behrouz Vossoughi. It was a cosmopolitan melting pot. Young people were obsessed with the "New Wave" of Iranian cinema—directors like Dariush Mehrjui were making films like The Cow, which were dark, intellectual, and definitely not the shiny "Great Civilization" the Shah wanted to promote.
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Why We Can't Stop Looking at These Photos
There's a psychological phenomenon at play here. It’s called anachronistic nostalgia.
We look at pictures of iran in the 70s because they challenge our stereotypes. For a generation raised on news footage of the 1979 Revolution, the Hostage Crisis, and the Iran-Iraq War, seeing a photo of an Iranian woman in 1974 driving a convertible with her hair blowing in the wind feels like a "glitch in the matrix."
It forces us to realize that history isn't a straight line. It doesn't always go from "primitive" to "modern." Sometimes it loops. Sometimes it takes a hard left turn.
Also, these photos serve as a digital archive for the massive Iranian diaspora. There are millions of Iranians living in Los Angeles ("Tehrangeles"), London, and Toronto who use these images to show their children: "This is where we came from. This was our world." It’s a way of reclaiming an identity that feels like it was deleted overnight in 1979.
The Reality of the "Miniskirt" Narrative
One of the biggest misconceptions? That everyone was dressed like they were in a Fleetwood Mac video.
If you look at raw, uncurated pictures of iran in the 70s, you see a fascinating mix. On the same street in downtown Tehran, you’d see a woman in a Chanel-style suit walking past a woman in a traditional black chador. You’d see a man in a sharp Italian blazer buying bread from a man in traditional tribal clothing.
The tension was visible.
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The rapid "Westoxification" (Gharbzadegi)—a term coined by intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad—was actually a huge point of contention. A lot of Iranians felt like their culture was being erased and replaced by a cheap American carbon copy. This resentment is exactly what fueled the 1979 Revolution. When people look at these photos today and ask, "Why would they change this?", they are seeing the aesthetic but missing the cultural identity crisis happening behind the eyes of the people in the frame.
Technical Details: The Look of the 70s
If you’re trying to identify authentic photos from this era, look at the film stock. Most color photography in Iran at the time was shot on Kodak or Agfa film. This gives the images a specific warm, slightly oversaturated look—lots of oranges, teals, and deep browns.
The cars are another dead giveaway. The Peykan was the "national car" of Iran, based on the British Hillman Hunter. It’s in almost every street scene. Seeing a Peykan parked next to a brand-new Cadillac (which were actually assembled in Iran at the "Iran General Motors" plant) is the quintessential 70s Iranian image.
Making Sense of the Archive
So, what do we actually do with this information? Looking at these photos shouldn't just be an exercise in "wasn't that cool." It should be a lesson in how quickly societies can shift.
If you want to explore this more deeply, don't just stick to Pinterest.
- Check the Kaveh Golestan archive. He was a legendary photojournalist who captured the real, gritty side of the 70s, including the "Citadel" (the red-light district of Tehran) and the working class.
- Look at the work of Abbas Attar. He photographed the transition from the Shah's era to the Revolution with incredible nuance.
- Watch "The House is Black" or "The Cow." These films give you the visual texture of the era better than any single photo can.
- Read "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi. While it's a graphic novel, it perfectly captures the transition from the late 70s into the early 80s through a child's eyes.
The most important thing is to remember that a photo is a fragment. Those pictures of iran in the 70s are real, but they are only one truth. They represent a window of time where Iran was trying to figure out if it could be both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, all at once. The fact that we are still staring at them fifty years later proves they haven't figured it out yet—and neither have we.
To get a true feel for the era beyond the "fashion" shots, look for street photography that includes the backgrounds—the shop signs, the dusty alleys, the construction cranes. That’s where the real history is hiding. Contrast the high-fashion portraits with the documentary photos of the 1978 protests to see how the "dream" of the 70s eventually met the reality of the streets.