Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Nov 28 2009

Through the looking glass

Iran and the Arab world were the focus of last week’s Paris Photo, a
photography show confirming international interest in Middle Eastern
art, writes David Tresilian in Paris

Hot on the heels of a well-attended dossier exhibition on 165 years of
Iranian photography at the musée du quai Branly, the Middle Eastern
and photographic theme continued at this year’s Paris Photo
photography show at which Iran and the Arab World were guests of
honour. Both events included significant historical components, as
well as accounts of contemporary trends. Together they provided an
intriguing glimpse both of the history of Middle Eastern photography
and of its place on the contemporary international art scene.

Held each year since 1997, Paris Photo is a major international show
that this year was housed in the prestige environment of the Carrousel
du Louvre and attracted around 100 galleries from 23 countries. Every
year there is a guest of honour, with the chosen country’s
photographic traditions placed on show in relation to its contemporary
production. Last year’s guest was Japan, and this year French curator
Catherine David, a specialist in Middle Eastern art and photography,
provided a focus on Iran and the Arab World.

Immediately upon entering this year’s show, once past a café area
apparently used for professional networking, visitors encountered an
exhibition of historical photographs taken from the archives of the
Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a Beirut-based NGO, with an adjacent
space being used to house a "statement" section that consisted of
eight photography galleries from Iran and the Arab world representing
some 15 emerging photographers.

In her curatorial essay in the show’s catalogue, David provided an
account of the beginnings of photography in the Arab world. Starting
in the 1840s, European photographers began to visit biblical and
historical sites in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, producing images of
panoramic landscapes, historical monuments and "native types,"
particularly veiled women or local merchants and craftsmen, all of
which became material for innumerable photograph albums and postcards.
>From the 1860s onwards, European and Armenian photographers began to
establish permanent studios in Arab cities, the most famous of which
were probably orientalist photographers Félix Bonfils in Beirut and
Lehnert and Landrock in Tunis.

It was only later, David writes, that Middle Eastern populations
became both the authors and the subjects of photographs, and only
later, too, that the studio photograph, a characteristic Middle
Eastern genre, began to enjoy a vogue among the region’s middle and
upper classes. However, once photography had firmly established itself
in Iran and the Arab World, dated here to the early decades of the
last century, it began to play an important role not only for domestic
purposes, innumerable families recording significant rites of passage
through a visit to the photographic salon, but also for recording
national events and in the illustrated and celebrity press.

Photography became an art form in its own right, with Cairo studio
photographers, such as the Armenians Van Leo or Armand, specialising
in glamourising the actors, actresses, singers and dancers of the
golden age of Egyptian cinema and producing carefully posed images of
the country’s beau monde. Elsewhere, photographers such as Hashem
El-Madani in Lebanon and Latif El-Ani in Iraq specialised in recording
the populations and streetscapes of rapidly changing Arab cities like
Sidon and Baghdad.

Such images, David writes, serve as evidence of the cosmopolitan
character of the Arab world’s major cities in the earlier part of the
last century, as well as of the cross-over between photography,
popular imagery, the cinema and advertising, with some Cairo
photographers at least being influenced by experimental trends in the
arts, such as surrealism.

It is this heritage of Arab photography that today is under threat as
a result of poor conservation and a lack of proper archives, and in
order to illustrate the wealth of material available David had
selected 50 images from the 300,000 or so now contained in the AIF
archives for the show’s central exhibition. Set up in 1997 and relying
on funding from American foundations, the AIF’s mission is to
research, collect and preserve the photographic heritage of the Arab
world, persuading individuals, studios and organisations to part with
prized, if sometimes poorly conserved, materials in order that these
may be properly archived and preserved.

According to collections manager Tamara Sawaya, speaking in an
interview with the Weekly, the AIF is one of the only such
organisations in the Arab world, and it has taken a lead not only in
researching and trying to preserve the photographic production of the
region, but also in drawing attention to the sometimes poor condition
of Arab public collections, for example those held by the region’s
newspapers.

Making such images available to a wider public is another of the AIF’s
aims, and in addition to a programme of exhibitions that has taken
selections of images on tour in Europe and the United States, it is
making its entire collection available on- line in digitized form,
also allowing users to purchase high- resolution versions for
professional purposes.

Catherine David’s selection of images from the AIF collection for
Paris Photo included images by familiar Cairo studios such as Van Leo,
Alban and Armand, including a 1940 portrait of the francophone
Egyptian writer Albert Cossery, apparently taken months before he left
Egypt, and at least one of Van Leo’s own extensive series of
self-portraits. There was a series of photographs taken by Egyptian
film director Shadi Abdel-Salam, director of Al-Mumiaa (1969), while
working on the 1959 film Hikayat hubb, and a selection of studio and
other photographs from the Baghdad of the 1960s.

Eight Iranian and Arab galleries were presenting contemporary work at
Paris Photo, though it was disappointing to see no Egyptian
representation. Among the eight galleries, two were from Tehran, two
from Tunis and two from Dubai, with galleries from Marrakech and
Beirut also being represented. Each had been invited to present the
work of emerging photographers, with Iranian photography making a
strong showing not only in the selections presented by the Assar and
Silk Road galleries from Tehran, but also in the work by Reza Aramesh
presented by the B21 Gallery from Dubai.

Aramesh photographs re-stagings of politically motivated atrocities
with actors in the comfortable surroundings of English country houses,
and some of his images had been used as publicity materials for Paris
Photo. (The main image was a 1970s studio shot of a gun-toting girl by
Van Leo.) Still on the political violence-related theme, the Beirut
and Hamburg- based Sfeir-Semler gallery was displaying a series of
snapshot-type images of guerilla fighters by Akram Zaatari in the
statement section, many of them apparently taken in prison. A "liberty
of appearing" series of more gentle Cairo street scenes by Yasser
Alwan came as a form of relief.

In addition to the Iranian and Arab galleries exhibiting in the
statement section of the show, other European and North American
galleries had also dug into their archives of Middle Eastern
photographs, with the well-known Magnum agency (Paris) presenting the
news photography of Iranian photographer Abbas, for example, and
Bernheimer (Munich) showing vintage prints shot in Iran in 1949. Still
other galleries were presenting contemporary photographers working in
the Arab world, such as Moroccan Laila Essaydi, represented by Edwynn
Houk (New York), and Egyptian wunderkind Youssef Nabil, represented by
Michael Stevenson (Cape Town).

The Serge Plantureux gallery (Paris) had dug up what was advertised as
"the first photograph ever taken in the Orient," a view of the outside
of Mohammed Ali Pasha’s harem in Alexandria taken on 7 November 1839
by French photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet.

Press material produced around the show, not least that in the various
glossy art magazines with stands, focused on twin issues of
representation and market behaviour. Ever since the late
Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said drew attention to it in
his 1978 book Orientalism, the distorted representation of the Orient
in the western world has been the stock-in-trade of academic industry,
and in her role as curator of the Iranian and Arab focus at this
year’s Paris Photo Catherine David gamely fielded questions about the
selection of the material and the "orientalism," or otherwise, of the
pieces on show.

However, Paris Photo is primarily a commercial show, and that being so
market conditions and the positioning of Iranian and Arab photographic
materials on the international art market was perhaps of more pressing
interest. As is well known, Arab art has undergone something of a boom
on international markets in recent years, in a trend fed by the
expansion of public art institutions and museums, particularly in the
Gulf, the development of a significant number of private collectors,
and growing international appetite for the Middle Eastern label.

It is now not uncommon for contemporary Arab artists to command prices
running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though according to
the art magazine artpress, the record for a contemporary artist from
the region is currently held by the Iranian Fahrad Moshiri for his
piece Eshgh, "a calligraphy of the word ‘love’ done in Svarowski
crystal," which made over a million dollars at auction last year in
Dubai.

Such conditions have not left photography untouched, and though it
seems unlikely that Arab and Iranian photography will command the
prices paid for Arab and Iranian art, what Paris Photo deputy director
Guillaume Piens described as the show’s "exploratory side" was
intended to suggest that there was a "milieu being born at the present
time" that had an interest in collecting Middle Eastern photography.
While there are few public or private collectors of such material at
present, Piens said, sales at auction in London and Paris have
suggested that this situation may be changing. The fact that most of
the Middle Eastern photography galleries invited to the Paris show had
been founded within the last ten years or so confirms this impression.

According to the Moroccan art magazine diptyk, while prices for Middle
Eastern photography have been falling, possibly as a result of the
world financial crisis, there is nevertheless a healthy market in
historical photography. The Baudoin Lebon gallery (Paris) was selling
views of Egypt taken by the 19th- century French photographer Gustave
Le Gray for between 10,000 and 150,000 euros at this year’s Paris
Photo, and anyone interested could expect to pay between 15,000 and
100,000 euros for one of Horst’s 1940s photographs of Iran.
Price-wise, the star among contemporary Iranian photographers is
Shirin Neshat, based in the United States and represented by Paris
gallery Jérôme de Noirmont, whose work Women of Allah can fetch
between 50,000 and 120,000 euros.

Looking at some of the contemporary material on show at this year’s
Paris Photo, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the lessons
of Orientalism had been taken on board by at least some of the
photographers. There seemed to be a lot of photographs of subjects
that might be described as "native types," together with a slew of
works dealing with women (veiled and unveiled) and political violence.
Naturally, contemporary photographers are vastly more theoretically
self- conscious, but it was possible to come away with the nagging
feeling that there was a line between some of these images, taken by
regional photographers but sold on the international market, and
earlier 19th and 20th-century European orientalist photographs.
Perhaps each new generation has to negotiate issues of representation
afresh.

Emerging from the slightly giddy atmosphere of Paris Photo, where talk
of money and "the next big thing" — contemporary Pakistani art,
according to artpress — was never very far away, it came as a relief
to enter the otherworldly atmosphere of the musée du quai Branly for
the museum’s survey exhibition of historical and contemporary Iranian
photography, curated by Anahita Ghabaian-Ettehadieh of the Tehran Silk
Road gallery in cooperation with Iranian photographers Bahman Jalali
and Hasan Sarbakhshian.

While photography was introduced into Iran at the same time as into
the Arab world, the vector was rather different. Whereas European
photographers swiftly established themselves in the Arab countries,
producing a now-familiar series of orientalising images, in Iran it
seems to have been more difficult for European photographers to find a
niche, and a main impetus behind the development of photography in the
country came from the personal interest of the Qajar monarch Nasser
El-Din Shah. It also seems to have been more difficult for European
visitors to visit Iran, and there was no equivalent of the package
tours of historical sites that were available from the late 19th
century onwards for sites in Egypt and the Levant, presumably
inhibiting the development of a postcard market.

The earliest images from the musée du quai Branly exhibition therefore
date from the collection made by Nasser el-Din Shah, now located in
the Golestan Palace in Tehran and in the main closed to visitors.
Nasser el-Din seems to have photographed at least in part for his own
amusement, and the quai Branly show includes some odd images,
apparently showing the shah in fancy-dress. Easier to understand are
the photographs taken by the Armenian photographer Antoine Sevruguin,
who worked in Iran until his death in 1933 and ran a successful studio
in Tehran.

Selections from Sevruguin’s surviving photographs can be found on the
Internet (many were destroyed during the 1905 revolution), and they
show cityscapes, monuments and studio portraits of individuals and
families. According to the exhibition notes — there is,
unfortunately, no catalogue — Sevruguin’s studio business took off
from the 1920s onwards, when the fall of the Qajars and the spreading
bureaucracy of the Pahlavi regime meant that individuals were
increasingly likely to require ID photographs. Portrait photographs
were also adopted, as in the Arab world, as family mementos and used
to adorn the walls of living rooms, shops and offices.

While this first section of the exhibition contains fascinating
materials, it seems to have been constrained by the few materials
available, and one wonders whether the Iranian Cultural Heritage
Organisation, which has overall responsibility for the Golestan Palace
and archives, might be persuaded to sponsor a more comprehensive
exhibition of 19th and early 20th-century Iranian photography outside
Iran. In the meantime, the strengths of the current exhibition lie in
its later sections dedicated to Iranian photojournalism and
contemporary art photography.

Curator Bahman Jalali made his name as a news photographer during the
1979 Iranian revolution, when photojournalism began to flood out of
the country, and in subsequent years he and fellow news photographer
and documentary filmmaker Kaveh Golestan were among the few
photographers to document the early years of the Islamic Republic and
the 1981-88 Iran-Iraq war. However, such documentary work in fact
began earlier in the 1960s, and the present exhibition includes both
images of the drama in the streets of Tehran during the revolutionary
period of 1978-79, as well as of earlier and later scenes photographed
in the 1960s and 1980s.

The last section of the exhibition is given over to contemporary
Iranian photography, which exhibits an eclectic range of styles in
order to express life in today’s Iran and to say something about
contemporary Iranian identity, particularly in its relation to the
country’s past. Sadegh Tirafkan, for example, superimposes motifs
taken from Persian miniature painting over images of modern Iranian
tourists visiting historical sites in an attempt at historical
layering, while Rana Javadi juxtaposes brightly coloured contemporary
textiles with black-and-white images taken from the archives of long-
defunct studio photographers. Shadi Ghadirian produces images of
domestic items — clothes on racks, cigarettes in boxes — with,
smuggled in among them, memories of recent conflicts, such as a
uniform hung among clothes or a bullet lying between cigarettes.

Elsewhere, Payman Hoshmanzadeh referenced ideas of youth and gender
segregation in his Paradoxical Life (2006), while Mohsen Yazdipour
reminded viewers of the wars and memories of wars that have marked
life under the Islamic Republic in his My First Name Soldier (2006),
rows of ID-style portraits of young men in military uniform, each with
his name written on an adjacent card. Individual reluctance in the
face of the nationalist choreography of the regime was indicated in
Mehran Mohajer’s Tired and Lazy (2008), a glimpse out of a window at a
row of flags, while Mehraneh Atashi represented herself in a series of
self-portraits showing her enlarged face against various Tehran street
scenes.

Visiting Iran a few years ago on a whistle-stop tour from Rasht and
Tabriz in the north to Tehran and then on to Isfahan, Shiraz and
Persepolis, magnificently atmospheric as the sun rose over the
surrounding plains, one was struck by how apparently little these
marvelous cities and landscapes have imprinted themselves on
extra-Iranian imaginations, possibly owing to the fact that the
photographic record is sparse when compared to that available for
other countries.

Perhaps the present international vogue for Iranian and Arab
photography will also increase international understanding of these
countries.

Paris Photo, 19-22 November 2009, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris

165 ans de photographie iranienne, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until
29 November

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