“It seems that their gaze has been waiting for my eyes for decades” says Amin Yousefi, contemplating the faces looking resolutely into the camera’s lens—both of his own camera, and those of a handful of photographers who documented the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, providing the source imagery for Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth. Yousefi’s method involves gathering archival photographs of protesting crowds taken during the turbulent months leading to the toppling of the Shah’s government in February 1979, in what would come to be recognised as a watershed geopolitical moment that continues to resonate throughout the region. Through a painstaking process of close looking, which he likens to that of a detective, Yousefi locates the faces in the crowd who, in that crucial second, look out from among the masses and directly into the lens of a camera. In re-photographing these faces through a magnifying loupe, Yousefi creates an allegory for the reverberation of this anti-monarchic and anti-Western impulse in the context of the present day, forming a bridge across time and collapsing history vertically. The resulting prints become palimpsests of multiple photographic acts that fracture the protester’s gaze, as we perceive at once their faces, the photograph of their faces (rendered in the dot matrix of the halftone press), and the photograph of the photograph, vignetted by the loupe.

Revolutions are often understood as the actions of a population, of a majority. Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth repositions revolution as a series of individual undertakings, forcing us to look directly into the eyes of citizens on the cusp of forcing a new world order. It also complicates the role of the camera in accepted representations of history, and the ways that images can function—indeed, multiply—beyond the photographer’s initial intention. As the writer David Campany states, “any and every photograph will hold more than we bargained for.”