Local portraiture : through the lens of 19th-century Iranian photographers

Author / Creator

Pérez González, Carmen, 1969- author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

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 photogr...

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.

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