Since the 1980s, the Iranian state has filled public space with murals, painted portraits, signs and monuments dedicated to those killed in the Iran–Iraq war, whom it commemorates as martyrs, and to the values of the revolution. Washed Red looks at this long, organised effort through the traces it leaves on walls and metal across the country: some faded, peeling or rusted by sun and rain.

I ask whether such efforts to turn sacrifice and history into political capital might have an expiry date, as paint does.

Many of these images are also memorials to real people, and I photograph them with that in mind.