After a brief review of the history of travel literature in Iran, this presentation focuses on the audio-visual narratives of travelers to Iran in recent decades, both Westerners and Iranian Americans, in terms of the travelers’ selected subject of observation, narrative style, intended audience, and cultural or political implications. While the works of professional documentary makers, reporters, and travel adventurers display an attraction to the "otherness" of what they convey to be the exotic social, political, and cultural aspects of Iran under the regime of the Islamic Republic, and its citizens, in a sense, expressing empathy with the subject but actually conveying a sense of superiority, the Iranian-Americans' recorded journeys can be described as "quests" by these individuals in search of a still-undiscovered ancestral "self," as it were. At the same time, while both groups attempt, to various degrees and for different purposes, to reduce the distance between the exotic other and the American (or, in general, the Western) self, the visual often enhances exoticism and the distancing between the subject and the audience. This paper also compares narrative strategies employed in new media travel accounts with those of conventional travelogue writings, such as Colin Thubron' s Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) and Christiane Bird's Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey through the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001). Furthermore, the paper scrutinizes the question of the objectivity of the observer, a claim that is made almost universally, whether explicitly or implicitly, in all such travel narratives. Audio-visual travel narratives examined include Rick Steve's Iran (2009), Justin Mashouf's Waring Factions (2008), Jane Kokan's (reporter) Forbidden Iran (2004), Jahangir Golestan’s Iran, A Video Journey (2003), Holly Morris' Adventure Divas: Iran Behind Closed Cha-dors (2002), and Christiane Amanpour's Revolutionary Journey (2000).