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This book examines Qajar Iran (1785-1925) as an ocular-centered society founded on what was seen and unseen, in the context of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
List of contents
- Introduction: Locations of Desire
- A Language of Its Own: Depictions of Women in Iranian Art Before and Shortly After the Arrival of Photography
- Corporeal Politics: Constructions of Gender and Power in the Royal Nasiri Photograph Albums and the Photography of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11)
- Collecting Women
- The Erotic Spaces of Qajar Photography
- For the Male Gaze: Depictions of Masculinity and Sexuality
- Enslaved Bodies of Desire: Photographs of Black African Slaves
- Conclusion: The Inevitable Witness
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).
Summary
This book examines Qajar Iran (1785-1925) as an ocular-centered society founded on what was seen and unseen, in the context of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Additional text
"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
