Word: sevruguin
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...Many of Sevruguin's images fall under the umbrella of Orientalism; one need not look further than their use as illustrations in imperialist western texts to infer that. Also, in his studio he took pictures of white men and women dressed as Easterners. These photographs show the attitudes of the Europeans-they were sure enough of their superiority that they could dress up as Iranians just for fun or for a souvenir to send home...
...Sevruguin, however, is not your average Orientalist. He lived in Iran his whole life (from sometime in the 1830s to 1933), and he expressed in his letters a deep love for his country. To him, Persia was hardly the exotic or inferior area that it was to the British and French. His studio photographs may just have been a concession to what was popular at the time, but it is hard to photograph a landscape through a political lens. Sevruguin's landscapes are beautiful, exotic when we look at them only because they are not fields and trees...
Among the photographs is a series that Sevruguin took when he had access to the Persian royal court. He was allowed to take formal portraits but also more casual, intimate pictures of the shah. These unlikely photographs were probably made possible because Nasir al-Din Shah, who reigned from 1848 to 1896, was a patron of photography and encouraged the craft in his country. One print is of a Western barber dying the shah's mustache. Here the European is serving the Easterner in a photograph by a native. It is here that it becomes clear that Sevruguin is more...
...photographs of Sevruguin are particularly relevant right now because of the prevalence of post-colonialist studies in academia. If a Persian made women seem passive and highly sexual, whose fault is that? How can we say he was purposefully promoting a Western ideal if he was not Western? Sevruguin's photographs, besides being diverse and stunning images, add a new dimension to the often oversimplified academic dialogue in the post-colonial...
...Antoin Sevruguin and the Persian Image is on display at the Sackler through June 10, 2001. For more information, call...