There are also a range of photos from the era, but since all the photographs were black and white then, I applied selective photoshop edits to highlight some of their more distinctive elements. The featured photo at the top of the page ¹ depicts the hostage takers standing victorious atop the walls surrounding the US embassy, and to showcase their success, they lit an American flag aflame. I chose to develop the fiery aspect in particular since it not only symbolized the nationalistic scale of the crisis (two nation locking horns, one nation’s flag being torn asunder by the other), but since it also foreshadowed the future deterioration of relationships between America and Iran in a metaphorical ball of fire.

Another photo involved the hostages themselves, blindfolded and paraded through the seized embassy grounds. ² To this picture, I focused on the blindfolds by overlaying them with American flag motifs to reflect the sentiment (felt by many US citizens at the time) that America as a whole had been taken hostage. In the background of the photo I superimposed an Iranian flag, rising from the horizon, to represent the parallel rise in power of the radical factions that would henceforth control the future of the Iranian nation, as well as the American hostages trapped in it.

Finally, in a photo depicting the actual storming of the embassy, ³ I placed Arabic verses from the Quran over the photo while simultaneously highlighting the portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini that someone is proudly holding aloft in the upper right hand corner. This was meant to capture the Islamic-based rhetoric that Khomeini used to justify and support the hostage crisis, and the same Islamic connection which eventually came to be one of the dominant aspects that newspapers focused on.