Images From The #iranelection

June 20, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News

As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere.

Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday. whether you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran”, dozens of images from the protests will pop up.

Fair warning: these images are raw and unfiltered, and some of them are quite gruesome, showing society getting shot and lying in pools of blood. The most tragic one shows what is described as a woman protester bleeding to death after being shot today. that same incident was caught on someone’s video or cell phone video camera and uploaded to YouTube. (I hesitate to link to that considering it is so hard to watch, but you can find it by searching for “An harmless girl was shot by Iran riot police” on YouTube).

There’s been plenty of debate about how big a role Twitter is playing in events in Iran. At the very least, it is being used as a channel to distribute data and images to the rest

of the world. It is not always clear where these images come from or who took them. Some of the images are credited to professional news agencies such as the AP, Getty, Reuters, and Arabic news organizations and are being spread around by bloggers both inside and outside Iran. Others look like they were taken in haste or on a cell phone. (For other images from Iran taken by citizen photojournalists, check out Demotix/iranelection).

Below are a few images circulating on Twitter. The first one was uploaded on June 14, 2009 and has no attribution (if anyone knows the photographer, please tell me in comments):

This one was plus uploaded on June 14, and is additionally uncredited:

This one was taken by Farhad Rajabali of news.gooya.com:

So was this one (Farhad Rajabali/news.gooya.com):

Beyond Twitter, you can find a slide show of Iran protest images on the New York Times. And on Flickr, Faramarz Hashemi has collected the set of #iranelection photos embedded below (some of them overlap with the ones on Twitter).

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