During the course of Iran-Iraq war (1984–87), Morteza Avini, a zealous revolutionary filmmaker and an art critic, launched a lifelong documentary project, titled Story of Victory(Revāyat-i Fath), which was screened in five seasons in National Iranian TV, and provided a firsthand account of the daily lives of Iranian soldiers on the battlefield. Avini blends the unprecedented scenes from the daily life of Iranian soldiers during the war with a stoic, propagandistic voice filled with an overwhelmingly poetic, pious narration celebrating the culture of Shi’ite martyrdom. Through Avini’s camera lens, war appears as a spiritual journey to overcome the malaise of materialism and Western civilization. Although Islamic symbolism is present throughout Avini’s works, an attentive reader of Avini’s essays would recognize the trace of the unlikely source of inspiration: German entomologist, author, and the world wars veteran Ernst Jünger. Jünger, who had achieved name recognition by publishing his account of WWI in Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), came to notice the transformative power of photographic and cinematic during his work on two photographic books dealing with the Great War. In the 1930s, Jünger subsequently compiled two other photographic books in which he offered a collection of short extracts from written accounts of accidents, accompanied by journal photographs of shipwrecks, natural disasters, wars, and revolutions. In the course of his activities, Jünger came to the conclusion that photography by exposing self to impending modern perils opens the possibility of the rise of a new human type. Unfortunately, the connection between the mobilization efforts during the Iran-Iraq war through Shi'ite iconography and the embrace of danger propagated by Jünger and the Weimar theorists of photography has remained unexplored. This study attempts to uncover the debt of Avini to Jünger’s radical account of camera as a transformative agent in his disavowal of modern democracy and the embrace of a heroic, revolutionary identity.