Camera Orientalis by Behdad Ali

Author:Behdad, Ali [Behdad, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226356549
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

A Brief History of Photography in Iran

The history of photography in Iran dates back to the very beginning of its invention and is deeply embedded in the broader history of Europe’s unofficial or indirect colonial involvement in the country.9 Soon after daguerreotype photography was introduced to Europe in 1839, Queen Victoria and Emperor Nicholas I of Russia each made a gift to Mohammad Shah of the apparatus so that he could produce his own pictures. Although written instructions were provided to the Iranian court, it was not until the French educator Jules Richard came to Iran in 1844 that the novel technology was first put to use.10 Besides Richard, many other European photographers worked in Iran in the mid-nineteenth century, including Luigi Pesce, Luigi Montabone, and Henri de Couliboeuf de Blocqueville. These European photographers were in one way or another associated with Western colonial powers. The Italian Pesce, for example, was an officer brought by the British to create a military school across from Dar al-Funun (the first Iranian polytechnic) so as to establish and reinforce Britain’s political and cultural power in Iran. Montabone photographed Iranian monuments and royalty in 1862 as one of the sixteen members of an Italian delegation sent to bolster Italy’s economic and political power in Iran.11 Similarly, Blocqueville came to Iran in the late 1850s and took photographs as part of the French military mission to the country, which like its Italian counterpart was competing with other European powers, such as England, Russia, and Austria, to gain economic and political advantages in the country. Even Sevruguin, who was an independent and resident professional photographer, maintained a direct connection with the Russian embassy where his father had worked.12

And while hesitant at first, the Qajar royalty soon took up the art with a passion. As a result, photography quickly gained popularity among wealthy Iranians, both as an enjoyable pastime and as an invaluable tool of social documentation and self-fashioning. Like their Ottoman counterparts, the Qajar royalty appreciated the camera both in its honorific function as a tool to produce images of themselves and their subjects and in its repressive function as a means to consolidate despotic power. Photography was deployed both to provide for the ceremonial presentation of royalty and to typologize and survey rural and lower classes. Contrary to the Orientalist claims made by some art historians and archivists that the Islamic prohibition against iconic images prevented Middle Easterners from taking photographs in the nineteenth century,13 photography also quickly became quite popular among upper-class Iranians, who embraced the new medium to fashion a modern(ized) sense of identity. As a result, there is an indigenous tradition of photography in Iran—a tradition that, though enmeshed in local culture and politics, is profoundly indebted to European aesthetic forms and ideological assumptions.

The Qajar prince Ghasem Mirza and Nasir al-Din Shah began taking photographs soon after the British queen and the Russian czar gave Mohammad Shah the daguerreotype apparatuses. Ghasem Mirza, a Francophile who studied in France and later became an

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