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 duree or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

About the Author

Staci Gem Scheiwiller is Assistant Professor of Modern Art History at California State University, Stanislaus. Her publications include a co-edited volume with Markus Ritter entitled The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East (2017) and the edited volume Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013).

Reviews

"The subject is fascinating and the book is rewarding. ... [Scheiwiller's] careful and detailed descriptions of the illustrations and the copious and thoroughly documented captions admirably place the examples within the history of Iranian stylistic deveopments, political history, religion, and literature."

--Woman's Art Journal

"Scheiwiller provides a significant intervention into the field of Qajar photographic history and serves as a timely and substantial addition to the growing corpus of analyses of gender and sexuality in modern Iran....Reading this book and its images is both edifying and thought provoking; the questions it forces us to confront carry resonances far beyond the area of Iranian studies, with repercussions for how we understand gender and sexuality and the postcolonial more fundamentally."

--Art and Vernacular Photographies in Asia

Book Information
ISBN 9781032179308
Author Staci Gem Scheiwiller
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 400g