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The Power-ful Art of Qajar Photography: Orientalism and (Self)-Orientalizing in Nineteenth-Century Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ali Behdad
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Extract

Paradoxical though it may seem, I would like to begin my discussion of Qajar photography with a little-known painting (pl. 1). The work of an anonymous mid-nineteenth-century artist, this image marks an aesthetic watershed. Here, an unknown artist is photographing Nasir al-Din Shah who is posing for a portrait. The image, of course, is meant to capture the power of Nasir al-Din Shah, a figure so grand he is simultaneously painted and photographed by court artists. As a “dynastic image,“ the painting focuses on the grandeur of the shah's power, symbolically represented by his opulent dress, royal pose, and attendant technology—he is the subject of the newest form of representation, i.e. photography. What is remarkable about this little-known, perhaps even aesthetically insignificant, image is the powerful way it speaks to the shift from painting to photography in mid-nineteenth-century Iran.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 1-4: Qajar Art and Society , 2001 , pp. 141 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2001

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Footnotes

1.

This essay is indebted for its production to the encouraging force of Wendy Belcher, and to Layla Diba's “forceful” encouragement

References

2. The words are Layla S. Diba's who uses them to describe early Qajar portrait paintings which created an image of dynastic power. I will discuss her insightful point later in my essay. (My argument will complement hers as I suggest that the photographic image, like the early portrait painting, produced an image of dynastic power.) See her “Images of Power and the Power of Images: Intention and Response in Early Qajar Painting (1785-1834)” in Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925, Diba, Layla S. with Ekhtiar, Maryam (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1998), 30–49.Google Scholar

3. Perez, Nissan N., Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East, 1839-1885 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 15.Google Scholar

4. See my essay, “Sevruguin: Orientalist or Orienteur?” in Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran, 1870-1930, ed. Bohrer, Frederick N., (Washington: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1999), 79–98.Google Scholar

5. An in-depth study of the picture postcard (known as scènes et types) is beyond the scope of this short paper; for an insightful study of these images see Alloula, Malek, Colonial Harem, translated by Myrna and Wald Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Prochaska, David, “The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 373–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Zoka, Yahya, Tārīkh-i ᶜakkāsī va ᶜakkāsān-i pīshgām dar Īrān [The History of Photography and Pioneer Photographers in Iran], (Tehran: Offset Press Inc., 1997), 5.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 24-25.

8. Ibid.

9. See Thornton, Lynne, The Orientalist Painter-Travellers (Paris. 1994)Google Scholar and Mary Stevens, Anne, The Orientalist: Delacroix to Matisse: The Allure of North Africa and the Near East (London, 1984).Google Scholar

10. Burgin, Victor, ed.. Thinking Photography (London: Viking, 1982), 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See my essay, “The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and His Precursors,” Stanford French Review, 12, (Fall-Winter 1989): 109–26.Google Scholar

12. The word is Edward W. Said's, the meaning “a man more interested in a generous awareness than in detached classification.” See his “Foreword” to Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Patterson-Black, Gene and Reinking, Victor, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), ix.Google Scholar I have used Said's word to describe Sevruguin, a resident photographer and artist who maintained an intimate and informed relationship with Iran. He was born and lived there and he visually represented it, not always, of course, for European audiences.

13. In Frederick N. Bohrer, ed., Sevruguin and the Persian Image, 33-53.

14. Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 177.Google Scholar

15. Diba, and Ekhtiar, Royal Persian Paintings 31.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., 33.

17. Ibid., 41.

18. Ibid., 45.