On the night before the presidential election of June 12, 2009, when supporters of the various different candidates were full of hopes and fears, I called a close friend and asked him to fill his car with petrol. When he asked why, I told him no one could tell what might happen after the vote, and if the situation required him to leave Tehran in a hurry, he would need to be ready.

For the six days from June 13 to 18, the shock and frustration that countless Iranians felt at the unexpected victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned Tehran into the scene of widespread protests at what many believed was a rigged vote, even a coup.

What was remarkable about the protests was that people decided to hold them in silence. So instead of shouting their slogans, they wrote them on placards. This was an unprecedented form of social action in Iran, and was widely interpreted as a sign of political maturity.

There was no shouting out of slogans for others to chant. Instead, people wrote down the things they thought needed to be said.

The home-made placards and banners carried in silence protesters over the summer of 2009 are testimony to the sense of anger and disappointment in the wake of what many felt was a stolen election. The selection shown here range from comic depictions of the winner, through poetic allusion, to stark images of police brutality.

Nevertheless, the protests were crushed violently by riot police and the government’s paramilitary allies in the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij movement.

On June 15, two to three million protestors accompanied opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mohammad Khatami and Mehdi Karroubi in a long march conducted in silence through Tehran, from Imam Hussein Square to Azadi Square. It was the largest anti-government demonstration since the 1979 revolution. Afterwards and in the days that followed, a number of people were killed and injured.

The petrol in my friend’s car remained untouched. Instead of leaving Tehran, he joined his fellow-citizens in marching through the streets and squares of the capital.