International Herald Tribune, June 1, 2007 p22
A rare glimpse of 19th-century Iran
Byline: Nazila Fathi
TEHRAN -- When Shadi Ghadirian was 21, she got a student job printing old photographs at the small photography museum here. She was so drawn by the 19th-century pictures of women with thick black eyebrows wearing head scarves and short skirts over baggy pants that two years later, in 2000, she began incorporating the imagery into her own photography.
Using clothes from the late 1800s, she dressed female friends and posed them in front of painted backdrops to look like the women in the antique photos. But her women appeared with something modern: a newspaper, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner.
The shots became known as the Qajar series and made her one of Iran's most famous female photographers.
"My pictures became a mirror reflecting how I felt: We are stuck between tradition and modernity," she said in an interview here.
Ghadirian's mentor was Bahman Jalali, a veteran photographer and the former director of the museum, who was also inspired by photographs of women from the 19th century. In his work, Jalali combined the faces of women from that era with harsh, angry red lines that were painted in protest over the walls of an old photo shop in the city of Isfahan in the early days of the 1979 revolution, and printed them on mirrors.
Both artists are among the very few people who have been exposed to the country's rich collection of old photographs - some 48,000 that are kept in Golestan Palace, a former royal home and now a museum. Only researchers and publishers are allowed to view the collection. About 50 of the photos, in poor-quality prints, are displayed in a basement.
The collection of 19th-century photos is particularly extraordinary because at the time Islam was interpreted as banning photographs of people's faces. The pictures exist because one person fell in love with photography: the country's most powerful man, the king.
He was Nasir al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896 and was first exposed to a camera in 1844, at 13. He became so fascinated by photography that in 1858 he invited a French photographer, Frances Carlhian, to set up the first official studio at his palace.
"We were lucky that the king fell in love with photography," Jalali said, "because it was the king who started taking pictures. The Islamic clerics could not oppose him."
Photos were taken of the royal family, including some of the king's 90 wives and children. The king also initiated documentary photography, requiring that his trips be photographed and sending photographers to take pictures of war and historical sites around the country. He obliged his provincial governors to send him photographs along with their reports.
"Iran is the only Muslim country in the Middle East where photography developed in a natural environment," said Mohammad Reza Tahmasebpour, a photographer and researcher on the topic. "Because it was supported by the state, different branches of photography flourished."
The pictures, carefully pasted in satin albums, are now kept in an earthquake-resistant and bulletproof room at Golestan Palace....
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Originally Posted by tim atherton
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