The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Don’t let the eunuchs out of the darkroom!
Meet the snap-happy shah who introduced photography to Iran, shot his beloved cat – and sparked a visual revolution
There once was a shah who lived in a palace between the mountains and the desert in Persia, near the Caspian Sea. One day, a wagon arrived at his gates bearing a gift from a rival court – a magical box that, using mirrors and a lens, could snatch a sliver of reality and fix it forever in silver.
Unfortunately, no one at the court could work out how to operate the thing, so for two years it remained a curiosity, sitting in dusty purgatory, until a travelling French photographer recognised the box for what it was, and showed the Shah how to make a daguerreotype.
It could be a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, couldn’t it? In fact, it’s a true account of photography’s arrival in Iran in 1842, which forms a small but tantalising strand of a new exhibition, Epic Iran, that opens at the V&A today.
Three years earlier, when the camera was unveiled in Paris and London – by Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, respectively – it had startled audiences. Imagine, then, how miraculous it must have seemed in 1840s Iran, a country still largely inaccessible to the outside world, run according to ancient dynastic traditions, and where the coming of modern conveniences such as train travel and the electric telegraph were still decades away. Unsurprisingly, the Shah’s first request to the Frenchman was to photograph the most valuable thing in the kingdom: his 11-year-old son, crown prince Nasir al-Din.
But as is generally the case with fables, the gift had a sting in its tail. Because while the prince (who in 1848 became Shah himself) almost single-handedly ensured photography’s subsequent boom in Iran, in doing so, he sowed the seeds of his own demise. The camera’s journey from court to studio and eventually to the street would bring the Qajar dynasty crashing to its knees.
From the moment Nasir al-Din first saw his face staring back from a burnished daguerreotype plate, he was obsessed with photography. “He decided this was his thing,” says Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, co-curator of the V&A exhibition, “and he took it on with real verve and enthusiasm.”
The prince immediately began taking instruction from the Frenchman who had photographed him – Jules Richard – followed by another French photographer, Francis Carlhian. By the time Nasir al-Din became Shah, at the age of 17, after his father’s death from gout, he was sufficiently devoted to his
Only chaste eyes could look at photos the Shah took of his 84 wives in the harem
hobby to turn parts of the Golestan Palace in Tehran into a darkroom and studios. The “Exalted Royal Photography Atelier” then secured funds from the treasury to hire three court photographers, and to invite a number of European professionals to enter the kingdom to take pictures, bringing with them the latest equipment.
Next, Nasir al-Din had his eunuchs trained in the art of printing. Only their chaste eyes could look at the hundreds of pictures he took in the palace harem, home to his 84 wives and nearly twice as many concubines. The women were probably his favourite subject, though he was also fond of snapping his cat, Babri Khan.
“He was very protective over the women,” says Sarikhani Sandmann, “and yet he gave them enormous freedom. Because he did [photography], they learned it too. We think one of his wives, Anīs al-Dawla, might have even run the photography studio when he was away from court.”
Nasir al-Din’s first court photographer was Aqa Reza Iqbal al-Saltane, a school friend with whom he had studied photography. In the 1860s, the two often lugged their heavy field cameras and mobile darkrooms across the empire to remote sites such as the Dome of Soltaniyeh in Azerbaijan. Among the 48,000 photographs in the Golestan Palace archives today, many depict these sorts of excursions, along with Nasir al-Din’s frequent hunting trips and military campaigns.
His favourite photographer for the latter is said to have been a
French army officer, the magnificently named Henri de Couliboeuf de Blocqueville, whose knack for capturing the hullabaloo of battle delighted the Shah. Unfortunately, on one particularly hair-raising outing he managed to lose all of his equipment in one go, and none of his photographs survives.
Naturally, Nasir al-Din’s courtiers did everything they could to keep up. It became a badge of honour to have one of your photographs pasted into the Shah’s satin-covered albums, and any Persian aristocrat worth his salt established a home studio and darkroom. Some even sponsored up-and-coming photographers to travel to St Petersburg or Paris to learn the latest processes. But as cameras improved, a network of teaching ateliers popped up across Iran, and it became possible to learn all that one needed close to home.
The first commercial studio opened not far from Golestan Palace in 1868 and was immediately popular. By 1888, the historian
I’timad al-Saltana would write that: “Nowadays the very number of photographers and their workshops in the capital Tehran and other major cities of Iran would make their enumeration a most arduous task.”
Because the camera gained ground in Iran mostly through the endeavours of indigenous photographers, rather than the thennascent tourist industry operating in the more accessible Levant nearby, “it led to something really unusual in the 19th century: a native eye,” says Sarikhani Sandemann. “Unlike most photography of the Middle East and North Africa, where at that time it was usually a white outsider taking the photographs, here you are seeing Iran from an Iranian’s eyes.”
In the exhibition, she adds, you can detect the influence photography had on Persian art, ushering in a greater realism and attention to perspective. The women in Isma‘il Jalayir’s Ladies Around a Samovar (1870), for instance, display a strange impassivity in their facial expressions, which suggests that the artist painted the figures after photographs.
Throughout his 50-year reign, Nasir al-Din’s enthusiasm for photography never waned. On each of his three trips to Europe, in 1873, 1878 and 1890 – the first official visits made by an Iranian monarch, carefully designed to reposition Iran as a civilised, forward-thinking nation – he made a point of visiting the studios of well-known photographers such as Nadar in Paris, and of exchanging fashionable cabinetcard portraits with royal leaders wherever he went.
But while his eyes were fixed on the glittering society of Belle Époque Paris, Vienna and London, not to mention photographic gadgetry such as the new portable camera that Kodak released in 1888, the Shah’s reputation at home was sinking. By 1890, the kudos earned from the modernising reforms of his early years – establishing a university, a postal service and so on – had long been forgotten. Now, all that anyone talked about was his ruinously expensive lifestyle, not to mention his having sold Iran’s irrigation, mining, tobacco and railway rights to foreigners.
In 1896, while visiting a shrine in south Tehran, Nasir al-Din was shot at close range and killed. In an intriguing twist, photographs of the rebel who was hanged for the crime began circulating throughout the country, along with pictures of riots and demonstrations. Photography had quietly escaped the confines of the palace, and morphed from an elite pastime into an agent for political change. Disparate groups of rebels quickly realised that cheap photographic postcards could be used to stoke revolution in the provinces, convincing the disgruntled to rise up and fight.
There was little that the Shah’s sickly son, Muzaffar al-Din, could do. In 1907, he was forced to sign a new constitution and institute parliament. The turmoil that followed, coupled with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, led to ever-greater foreign intervention and, eventually, the collapse of central authority. The last Qajar ruler, Ahmad Shah, was finally deposed in 1925. It is no surprise to learn that there are barely a dozen photographs of him in existence – and that the expression on his face is invariably one of utter despair.