Iran In Pictures A Photographic Insight

Iran in Pictures is a true insight and photographic journey inside one of the most ancient countries and cultures on our planet. The immense knowledge of the author about the country and his experience there deliver us a unique point of view on Iran’s everyday life, its rich history and extraordinary culture. Christopher Thornton is a professor born in Chicago in 1956. Writer and photographer, he teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has worked as a special correspondent for the U.S. State Department’s International Information Program and has written many articles and essays based on travel-related themes. In 2019 his first book, Descendants of Cyrus: Travels Through Everyday Iran, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. He is currently planning a book on eastern Europe that would also be a travel narrative.

Photography is clearly not a mirror of daily life: that images are constructions is especially obvious in 19th-century studio portrait photography. This book explores how indigenous Iranian photographers constructed their own realities in contrast to how foreign photographers constructed Iranians' realities. Through an in-depth comparative visual analysis of 19th-century Iranian portrait photography and Persian painting, the author arrives at the insight that aesthetic preferences correlate with socio-cultural habits and practices in writing, reading and looking. Subsequently, she advocates for a place in a global history of photography for those unknown, local photo histories (such as the Iranian one) and for the indigenous photographers who produced them.

She Who Tells a Story introduces the pioneering work of twelve leading women photographers from Iran and the Arab world: Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Gohar Dashti, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar, Shirin Neshat and Newsha Tavakolian. As the Middle East has undergone unparalleled change over the past twenty years, and national and personal identities have been dismantled and rebuilt, these artists have tackled the very notion of representation with passion and power. Their provocative images, which range in style from photojournalism to staged and manipulated visions, explore themes of gender stereotypes, war and peace and personal life, all the while confronting nostalgic Western notions about women of the Orient and exploring the complex political and social landscapes of their home regions. Enhanced with biographical and interpretive essays, and including more than 100 reproductions of photographs and film and video stills, this book challenges us to set aside preconceptions about this part of the world and share in the vision of a group of vibrant artists as they claim the right to tell their own stories in images of great sophistication, expressiveness and beauty.

-This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran, on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from August 26, 2017 through January 7, 2018.-

This book explores, through the vision of ten contemporary Iranian photographers, the contrasts and contradictions that exist in Iranian Society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each representation is different to the next and each image serves to represent the main conflict present in Iran today: that of the power of tradition versus the quest for modernity. Each of the ten photographers has chosen an aspect of daily life in their country, for example, a café, a shopping mall, and the clerics, with each serving to show another part of the mosaic of cultural experience in Iran. One theme that remains constant through all of the images is that of women, who remain living symbols of the interaction between change and stagnation. In this book, women test the limits of the Hijab and their experience is used to represent that of young women all around the world. Distributed by I.B.Tauris

From the time of its invention in 1839, photography had a crucial link to the Middle East. When Daguerre s invention was introduced, it was immediately hailed as a boon to Egyptologists and Orientalists wanting to document their archeological findings. The Middle East also beckoned European experimenters in this new medium for a simple technological reason: early photographs were more quickly and easily made in the intense light of the desert than in gloomy Paris or London. In Camera Orientalis, Ali Behdad examines the cultural and political implications of the emergence of photography in the Middle East. He shows that the camera proved useful to Orientalism, but so too was Orientalism useful to photographers, because it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame these exotic cultures in images for Western audiences. Behdad breaks with standard postcolonial approaches by showing that Orientalist photography was the product of contacts between the West and the East. Indeed, local photographers participated enthusiastically in exoticist representations of the region, adapting Orientalism to the taste of the local elite. Orientalist photography, we learn, was not a one-way street but rather the product of ideas and conventions that circulated between the West and the East."

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.