Invisible History: Photography as Sights of Modernity

This paper elaborates on depictions of rural spaces, which were decisively shaped and disseminated by the arrival of photography in Iran in the second half of the nineteenth century. While panorama shots of villages and rural landscapes turn up few and far between in photographic documentations from the 1870s onwards, they have increasingly evolved into a systematic way of visually mapping Persian dominions towards the end of the Nasiri Era. Such photographic campaigns, conducted by indigenous photographers, were carried out with the objective to create comprehensive knowledge of Persian territories and were thus mainly ordered or encouraged by Nāṣer-al-dīn Shah or the royal administration. The analysis of photographs that feature rural landscapes and panoramas of villages is faced with the pressing question of elaborating a theoretical framework, within which such images are best ‘read’. To define such a framework, this paper addresses three major theoretical considerations: (i) firstly, how photography with its claim to accuracy and objectivity constructed a comprehensive ‘geographical imagination’ that makes rural spaces visually accessible. (ii) Secondly, how the power-exerting gaze of the camera conceptualized and communicated rural space within a socio-political map? (iii) And finally, which role such visual narratives played in the exercise of political power, and in reinforcing the central state authority. Recent discourses on visual topography have increasingly paid attention to the ideological and discursive power of landscape images, including landscape photography. In this regard, it is commonly argued for a definition of landscape as a ‘medium’ in enforcing and shaping a coherent vision of nation in the nineteenth-century, when most nation states had been emerging. More than merely displaying the physical attributes of a geographical space, landscape images are an act of mapping and bounding the terrains, and thereby ‘exercising the political power’. In a similar vein, creating visual knowledge on rural spaces offers a unique and useful perspective on Persian territories, especially on north-eastern border regions, which were of crucial importance for the efficient regulation and governance by the central authority. This paper examines the representations of rural spaces in the second half of the nineteenth-century in Iran by primarily focusing on photographs taken by Mirza Hossein-ʿAli, and ʿAbdullah Qajar, preserved in the “Tholozan Collection” at the Middle East Centre Archive, Oxford.