Before the 1979 revolution, Iran was ruled for more than half a century by the Pahlavi dynasty: first by Reza Shah, from 1925 to 1941, and then by his son Mohammad Reza Shah, until he left the country in January 1979. Photographs from those decades show wide boulevards in Tehran, women in Western fashions, royal visits to European capitals and lavish state ceremonies. They are real, but they show only part of the picture. The same era brought rapid modernisation, oil wealth and expanding education, and also censorship, a feared secret police and growing anger that finally exploded in revolution.
The 25 photographs below, most of them from the Associated Press archive, follow that story from the 1940s to the 1970s. Each caption explains what the image shows and the history around it, with a few corrections where widely shared captions got the facts wrong, especially about which of the two shahs did what.
Two shahs, father and son
Reza Khan, an army officer, seized power in a 1921 coup and was crowned Reza Shah in 1925. He built a strong central state, a national army and the Trans-Iranian Railway, and in 1935 asked foreign governments to call the country Iran instead of Persia. When British and Soviet forces invaded in August 1941, he was forced to abdicate. His 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took the throne on 16 September 1941 and reigned until 1979.
The young Shah's family, 1942
Mohammad Reza Shah sits on the palace grounds near Tehran with his first wife, Queen Fawzia, a princess of Egypt's royal family, and their daughter Princess Shahnaz, born in 1940. The couple had married in 1939, while he was still crown prince, and divorced in 1948. The photo dates from his first year on the throne, when Iran was occupied by Allied forces. Photo: AP.
Sepah Square, Tehran, 1946
Buses, cars and pedestrians cross Sepah Square, then the main square of the capital, on 20 April 1946, with a domed building rising on the right. Iran mattered greatly to Britain and the United States at this time because of its oil, and because it bordered the Soviet Union, whose troops were only just withdrawing from the north of the country. Photo: AP / Tom Fitzsimmons.
Ferdowsi Avenue, 1946
On the same day in April 1946, traffic and pedestrians move along Ferdowsi Avenue, a broad street lined with modern European-style buildings and young trees. The street is named after the poet Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, the national epic. Naming streets after figures from Persian history was part of the Pahlavi effort to build a shared national identity. Photo: AP / Tom Fitzsimmons.
Lalezar and Istanbul avenues, 1946
Horse-drawn carriages share the junction with cars and crowds of pedestrians where Lalezar Avenue meets Istanbul Avenue. Lalezar was Tehran's fashionable shopping and entertainment street in the mid-20th century, known for its cinemas, theatres and shops. The mix of carriages and motor cars captures a city halfway through modernisation. Photo: AP / Tom Fitzsimmons.
1953: the coup that restored the Shah
In the early 1950s the popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh led parliament to nationalise the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Britain responded with an embargo and, with the United States, planned his removal. A first attempt on 15–16 August 1953 failed, and the Shah fled to Baghdad and then Rome. A second attempt on 19 August, backed by the CIA and British intelligence, succeeded. The Shah returned on 22 August, and in 2013 the US government released documents acknowledging its role.
The White Palace at Saadabad, August 1953
This is the White Palace in the Saadabad complex in northern Tehran, photographed in August 1953 just after the coup, with the Alborz mountains behind it. The return of the Shah strengthened his hold on power and closed the door on Mosaddegh's nationalist government. Many Iranians never forgot foreign involvement in the coup, and resentment of it fed into the revolution 26 years later. Photo: AP.
Reform, unveiling and everyday life
Like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in neighbouring Turkey, Reza Shah pursued secular modernisation and a single national identity built around the Persian language. He forcibly settled nomadic tribes such as the Bakhtiari and Qashqai, often with great brutality, and in 1928 ordered men to wear Western clothing. On 8 January 1936 his Kashf-e hijab decree banned the veil in public, and police were told to remove headscarves by force. The ban deeply offended religious Iranians and was relaxed after he abdicated in 1941. Women were also admitted to the new University of Tehran from 1937.
The eight images in this section are scanned family snapshots shared on Wikimedia Commons by contributor Nevit Dilmen. They were presented in the original collection as scenes from pre-revolutionary Iran, but the people, places and dates are not documented, so they are best read as glimpses of mid-century urban life rather than as dated records.
Two friends among the flowers
Two young women with short, curled hair, one holding a bunch of roses, pose in a flowering garden. The hairstyles and striped blouse suggest the 1950s or early 1960s. Snapshots like this, taken by friends and family, became much more common as cameras spread among the urban middle class. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
A trip to the waterfront
A group of young women in full skirts and short-sleeved tops stands beside an old truck at the water's edge, while a young man takes a photograph of his own. Behind them, houses climb a hillside above the water. The relaxed outing and mixed group reflect the freedoms that many middle-class city dwellers enjoyed in this period. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
Friends on the lawn
Two young women and two young men pose on a grassy slope in front of a stone building with an arched window. Men and women socialising in public in this way was ordinary in the larger cities by the 1950s, though far less so in rural and religious communities. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
A walk under the trees
Two women in patterned skirts walk arm in arm down a wide, tree-lined avenue. Long, shaded avenues of plane trees were a feature of Tehran and other Iranian cities, planted along water channels to cool the streets in summer. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
Preparing for the new year
Two young women stand by a table with a radio, a vase of flowers and a large tray of sprouted wheat. Grown greens like these, called sabzeh, are a traditional part of the table prepared for Nowruz, the Persian new year celebrated at the spring equinox. Education for girls, including secondary school, expanded steadily under both shahs. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
A party with fruit and friends
A group of young women and men crowds around a table laid with fruit, smiling at the camera. Fruit bowls are a staple of Iranian hospitality, offered to every guest. The scene could be a birthday, a family gathering or a student get-together. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
A couple on a new boulevard
A woman with a handbag and a man in a light coat stand on a wide, newly built street, with a modern apartment block and young saplings behind them. Planned boulevards and modernist buildings spread through Iranian cities in the decades after the Second World War, often funded by oil revenue. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
Tea under the umbrella
A family sits at an outdoor café table under a striped umbrella, the father in a suit with a cup of tea, the children close by. Tea is central to Iranian social life, and garden cafés were a popular weekend outing for city families. Photo: Nevit Dilmen collection / Wikimedia Commons.
Royal glamour and foreign guests
Queen Soraya in Rome, 1953
Queen Soraya, the Shah's second wife, poses in a white organdy evening gown at the Rome studio of Italian designer Emilio Schuberth on 13 May 1953, as he adjusts the pleats. Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary married the Shah in 1951. The marriage ended in 1958 because she could not have children and the Shah wanted a male heir. She later lived mostly in Paris and died there in 2001. Photo: AP.
Gina Lollobrigida at a house of strength, 1963
Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida and her husband, Milko Škofič, sit among bare-chested athletes at a zurkhaneh, or "house of strength", on 20 May 1963, as guests of Princess Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister. The zurkhaneh is a traditional gymnasium where men practise varzesh-e pahlavani, an ancient Iranian sport that combines exercise, wrestling and music. UNESCO lists the ritual as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage. Photo: AP.
Lunch with Winston Churchill
The Shah, in military uniform, and Queen Soraya pose with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street on 21 February, after lunch together. Since Soraya was queen from 1951 to 1958 and Churchill left office in April 1955, the visit took place during Churchill's second term. Britain remained one of Iran's closest Western partners after the 1953 coup. Photo: AP.
The White Revolution and the oil boom
In January 1963 the Shah launched the "White Revolution", a reform programme approved in a referendum that the opposition boycotted. It included land reform, votes for women, profit-sharing for factory workers and a Literacy Corps in which young conscripts taught reading in villages; national literacy rose from roughly a quarter to over 40 percent. The clergy opposed parts of the programme, and a cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini rose to prominence as its fiercest critic. After the 1973 oil crisis, Iran's oil income soared, fuelling a construction boom, a growing middle class and also inflation and inequality.
A Tehran sidewalk, 1970
Pedestrians in a mix of Western clothes and full black chadors walk past cars and modern buildings on 16 June 1970. The contrast between the two styles of dress sums up a society divided between rapid Westernisation and religious tradition. Photo: AP / Roy Essoyan.
Traffic on a city corner, 1970
A white sedan waits at a corner beside a small shop with Persian signs, while modern office blocks line the street beyond. Traffic jams were becoming a constant feature of Tehran as car ownership rose quickly in the 1960s and 70s. Iran assembled its own popular car, the Paykan, from 1967. Photo: AP / Roy Essoyan.
Crossing the street, 1970
Men in suits and a girl in a pale blue coat cross a busy street in front of a glass-fronted commercial building. The scene looks much like any growing city of that time. Tehran's population grew rapidly in the decades before the revolution, as people moved from the countryside in search of work. Photo: AP / Roy Essoyan.
Bumper to bumper, 1970
A red-and-white double-decker bus and a stream of cars fill the road while women in black chadors cross between them. Many of the cars were Iranian-assembled models, and orange shared taxis were a familiar sight. Migration from rural areas, partly caused by the limits of land reform, swelled the city's working-class districts. Photo: AP / Roy Essoyan.
A pool for the oil company
Guests swim in an octagonal pool at a guesthouse of the National Iranian Oil Company, surrounded by umbrellas, lawns and gardens. Oil was the backbone of the economy, and the company's staff enjoyed some of the best facilities in the country. Photo: AP / Horst Faas.
Tehran from above, 1971
A wide boulevard sweeps past a landscaped roundabout with ornamental pools, hotels, billboards and high-rise blocks in July 1971. Tehran was transforming fast, and planners were building in a style meant to rival Western capitals. Photo: AP / Horst Faas.
A garden of cypresses, 1971
The AP caption describes visitors at a holiday resort on the Caspian Sea in July 1971. The colonnade at the end of a cypress-lined path closely resembles the Tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, the memorial to Iran's most loved poet, so the location may have been mislabelled. Either way, families stroll through a formal Persian garden, one of the country's great cultural traditions. Photo: AP / Horst Faas.
Crowns, anniversaries and imperial nationalism
From the mid-1960s the Shah increasingly presented his rule as heir to the ancient Persian empires. In October 1971 he hosted a vast celebration at Persepolis marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, and later changed the official calendar to count from the reign of Cyrus the Great. Critics at home pointed to the enormous cost of these events at a time of poverty in much of the country.
The coronation, 1967
Mohammad Reza Shah places a crown on the head of his third wife, Farah Diba, whom he had married in 1959. He had delayed his own coronation for 26 years and was finally crowned on 26 October 1967, his 48th birthday, at Golestan Palace in Tehran, taking the ancient title Shahanshah, "king of kings". Farah became the first woman crowned as empress in modern Iran. Photo: public domain (Iran).
Gymnasts on display, 1975
Hundreds of gymnasts in red and white form a perfect pattern on a stadium field. According to the AP caption, the display took place on 16 October 1975 during celebrations of the Persian Empire's founding. Mass gymnastics displays like this one were used by many governments at the time to project unity and discipline. Photo: AP / Harry Koundakjian.
From one-party rule to revolution
Several widely shared captions credit these final steps to "Reza Shah", but it was his son. On 2 March 1975 Mohammad Reza Shah merged the existing parties into a single state party, Rastakhiz ("Resurrection"), and told Iranians to join it or leave the country. SAVAK, the secret police set up with US help after 1953, was notorious for surveillance and the torture of dissidents.
By 1977 an economic slowdown, high inflation and anger at corruption and repression had united very different groups: clerics loyal to Khomeini, liberal nationalists, leftists, students, bazaar merchants and oil workers. After months of strikes and mass protests, during which security forces killed many demonstrators, the Shah left Iran on 16 January 1979. Khomeini returned on 1 February, the monarchy collapsed on 11 February, and in a referendum that spring Iranians approved an Islamic Republic. The Shah died in exile in Cairo on 27 July 1980.
Reading nostalgic photos with care
Photos of pre-revolutionary Iran are often shared to show how "free" the country once was, and in some ways, especially for urban women's dress and social life, that is true. But most of these images show wealthy or middle-class Tehran. Much of rural Iran was poor, many people could not read, and political freedom was tightly restricted. The revolution itself began as a broad popular movement before Khomeini's camp took control and sidelined its secular partners. Both sides of that history matter for understanding the photographs, and the country, today.
Sources: photographs from the Associated Press archive and Wikimedia Commons as credited; Wikipedia: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Wikipedia: Reza Shah; Wikipedia: 1953 Iranian coup d'état; Wikipedia: White Revolution; Wikipedia: Rastakhiz Party; Wikipedia: Iranian revolution; Wikipedia: Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary; Wikipedia: Zurkhaneh; originally compiled by Business Insider.
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